Leçons sur la première Philosophie de Russell (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 125 thought in just the same words as those he used on an earlier occasion. Yet, if you ask an author to summarize or revise what he has said, he will find it impossible to be completely faithful to what he meant to say. Ultimately, what one means to say will always remain incomplete and unsatisfactory when articulated in language. The more important his message, the more an author has the feeling of having inadequately expressed it. There is always something more and something different to say in our attempts to say the same thing. That is why it is dangerous to let an author correct his own proofs; he always wants to rewrite the book. The finished product is always a compromise between what he really meant to say, what he thought he was saying, and what he actually expresses. If one wants a concrete example, there is none better than that of Ludwig Wittgenstein before his philosophy classes (which Gilson, on the basis of Norman Malcolm's account, uses to excellent advantage): here was a professor who was almost always discontented with what he said, who often stopped himself in mid-sentence, referring to his just enunciated words as stupid, idiotic, impossible, and who was often so exhausted by the experience of not having been able to say what he meant to say to his own satisfaction that, at the end of the hour, he would race out to a cinema in an attempt to forget the whole debacle. We can do no more here than indicate some of the rich and solid examples Gilson uses to illustrate his thesis (cf. pp. 121-128, 165-169, 175-176, 206, and passim); they are scattered throughout the book and, to this extent, one has to say the argument is badly organized. Which is to say that what we find in it of most interest to ourselves is not necessarily what the author himself was most attached to. JAMES M. EDIE Northwestern University Ler sur la premikre Philosophie de Russell. By J. Vuillemin. Philosophies pour l'~ge de la science. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1968. Pp. 354. Paper, np) The title of this book suggests, and the preface appears to confirm, that this work is intended as an introduction to the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, directed to a French audience which the author judges to be ignorant of logic and British analytic philosophy in general, and the work of Russell in particular. "First philosophy" refers to the concentration of the study on Principles of Mathematics of 1903, a work which preceded the presentation of the distinctively Russellian contributions of the theory of descriptions and the theory of types in mathematical logic, and the entire area of Russell's work in epistemology. However, in fact, the scope of this work is limited neither in being introductory nor in being directed toward an early avork of Russell's. M. Vuillemin has undertaken and accomplished two much more extensive and important tasks: first, he has presented Russell's original insights in mathematical logic against the background of the issues and authors in philosophy of mathematics at the turn of the century and later; second, he has given a careful and comprehensive analysis of the philosophical significance of the ideas of Russell's mathematical logic in the context of the development of Russell's philosophy. 126 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In the first part of the book the author is concerned with making clear the basic logical concepts of Principles of Mathematics. In doing this he shows how the need for such concepts arose in mathematical philosophy. He relates Russell's statement of these needs and his proposed solutions to the problems to contemporary work in this area. The careful comparison of Russell with Peano and Frege is especially valuable. M. Vuillemin moves with the ease of familiarity and comprehension through the ideas and history of this technical field, at one time returning to parallels and contrasts with Leibnizian or Kantian philosophies of mathematics, at another moving forward to recent emendations and evaluations in Russell's own later work or in the work of G6del, Carnap, and Church, among others. But it is...