The Development of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 421 by our actions. These are rarely self-evident; they require interpretation. This book is likely to leave a reader confused about the value of Royce's work and about Kuklick's purposes in writing. Admitting the Roycean point that confusion may be an irreducible feature of our temporal existence, still it would seem possible, certainly provocative, and in the spirit of Josiah Royce to know more about Royce's significance and Kuklick's aims. Kuklick has been a solid Royce scholar, an intellectual historian of real competence. Now we need for him to become like Royce himselfwboldly philosophical. JOHN K. RorH Claremont Men's College The Development o/Bertrand Russell's Philosophy. By Ronald Jager. (London: George Alien & Unwin, 1972. Pp. 520. $17.50) Jager's book covers every major area in which Russell wrote, and it presents his philosophical development by tracing ideas from the earliest to the latest writings. The exposition is notably clear. Jager's reconstruction of Russell's less than clear ideas is done with care and patience. Critical evaluation occurs throughout the book as an integral part of it rather than as an afterthought. Often it is Jager criticizing Russell. Sometimes, but not often enough, criticism is offered by one of Russell's contemporaries. The most interesting moments are those when it is Russell criticizing himself. Others, e.g., Eames, Ayer, and Vuillemin, have given this kind of admirable treatment to selected topics in Russell's philosophy, but Jager's study is the first to have this wide a range. The organization of the book is excellent. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the design of the book and of Russell's philosophy. Chapters 2 through 8 detail his development from early idealism to neutral monism. Chapters 9 and 10 cover topics which interested Russell throughout his long career, namely, politics, education, ethics, and religion. Jager organizes the book around two basic principles. One principle concerns what he takes as three chronological phases of Russell's work: (1) realism--Russell's interest in metaphysics and the doctrine of external relations, (2) atomism--his preoccupation with logic and the notion of logical form, and (3) neutral monism--his concern with science and the problems of sensation and perception. As for the early period of idealism, this is left undeveloped by Jager (and Russell). The other principle consists of two fundamental themes in Russell's philosophical outlook: (1) "the twin roles of analysis and synthesis" and (2) "the reciprocity between the technical and the philosophical in his work." Jager uses these two themes to present Russell's philosophy as a system and to show that it is something more than a bundle of ideas. Russell's theory of descriptions in logic, for example, is shown to be the basis for his method of construction in ontology. His extensional logic becomes the counterpart of a metaphysics of external relations. The doctrine of the systematic ambiguity of truth and falsehood culminates in the problem of epistemological privacy. The idea of individual freedom in Russell's political theory has its correlate in his insistence in epistemology on the privacy of sense experience. His early intuitionism in ethics is viewed as a kind of moral sense datum theory; and his later ethical naturalism involves the hope that just as physics begins with the private data of perception and builds up its objective structures, so ethics might achieve an objective validity from subjective data. In view of these and other interrelated ideas and methods Jager suggests that Russell the logician creates the unities that Russell the religious mystic envisages. Although he cautions that his suggestion is more of a hunch, Jager is quite successful in presenting Russell as a systematic thinker and artist instead of as a pieceworker on the assembly line of analysis. Given the book's scope, it is understandable that sometimes assertions appear where arguments are needed. In some places Jager simply says rather than shows that certain 422 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ideas are interrelated in Russell's philosophy. His choice of the term "freedom" to tie together various areas of Russell's thought appears appropriate, but the idea of freedom seems undeveloped--perhaps as much by...