Russell, Idealism, and the Rise of Analytic Philosophy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS t49 tO the more affordable KSA) for each note individually, since the order is often quite different from that of WKG. In case this last point may seem merely academic, in view of the less than gigantic sales of scholarly books these days, I should like to conclude with the hope that this valuable volume will do so well that another edition will indeed be called for in the not-too-distant future--and that we can have individual references to the KSA in that one. GRAHAM PARKES Universityof Hawaii Peter Hylton. Russell, Idealism, and the Rise of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 199o. Pp. xv + 4~o. NP. Hylton's book is the second large-scale effort in recent years to come to grips with early Russellian texts and themes; the other is R. M. Sainsbury's Russell. Sainsbury's approach was conceptual, Hylton's is historical: "What if anything," Hylton writes, "can we learn about analytic philosophy by taking seriously the fact that [idealism] was one of its points of origin?" Since Russell's first publications are nearly a century old, a book that treats Russell as a piece of history and not as a prime player on the current scene is certainly in order. But Hylton's treatise is not quite the historical essay that one might expect. He does not attempt a cultural analysis, a Russell'sOxbridgeto stand beside Wittgenstein'sVienna. Nor does he proceed archaeologically, working through mountains of unpublished materials and giving a point by point, month by month, account of Russell's development. Rather he provides a sequence of extended meditations on selected Russellian texts exhibiting philosophical sophistication, control, and a probity that at times approaches Dummett's. Like Dummett's, Hylton's chapters wander far from their official theme, and on many pages one might wonder whether a single word would change if the idealists had never lived. Hylton opens with remarkably sympathetic accounts of Greene and Bradley, developing the psychologisms and organicisms and dialecticalisms that intrigued Russell in his undergraduate years and to which Russell paid lip service in his 1897 Essay on the Foundations ofGeometry. In Hylton's account, Moore's criticisms (Mind, a899) of psychological residues in his Essay turned Russell against idealism. (In the margins of his review copy of Russell's Essay,' Moore wrote, "Russell does in places reverse Kant's argument, inferring apriority from subjectivity.") In the next two years, Moore and Russell replaced the pulsating mind-made or mind-structured cosmos of the idealists with a marvelous crystal palace of changeless propositions, all of them potential objects of immediate acquaintance. Hylton dubs this metaphysics Platonic Atomism. I liked these sections, though it is not clear to me that Russell in 1899 was reacting particularly to Greene and Bradley and not just as much to Ward or Bosanquet or Kant or Hegel. Unlike Moore, Russell never bothered to refute idealism, and his later Kindly lent to me by the present owner, Professor Milton Munitz. i5o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3011 JANUARY 1992 autobiographical accounts cannot be trusted to locate the precise points of disagreement between him and the idealists in 1899. Hylton stresses hard disagreements, such as Russell's confidence that he knew mathematics even if he knew nothing else, contrary to the idealists' view that one cannot know anything unless one knows everything. He hints at, but does not stress, the clash between the quasi-religious tone of idealist texts and the stern verbal discipline of Russell's 19o3 Principles of Mathematics, and he barely touches upon Russell's delayed allergic reaction to the common idealist view that ultimate reality is somehow conscious or somehow alive. More interestingly and surprisingly, Hylton claims that Russell retained much from the idealists, for example, his lifelong view that empiricism has "limitations" and his Kantian confidence that one can have non-sensual intuitions of logical principles and logical forms. This helpfully corrects accounts like Pears's that Russell's work is empiricism rewritten in the predicate calculus. For most readers, the Russell Paradox casts the darkest shadow across the world of the Principles. In Hylton's account the Paradox is not so central...