The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (review)

Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 452 pp.

It is nearly a century since G. E. Moore's Refutation of Idealism and Principia Ethica (both 1903) and Bertrand Russell's mathematical logic established analytic philosophy as the new philosophical wave of the English-speaking world. Since those heady times in Cambridge, the fields of philosophy, literature, and the study of their interrelations certainly seem to have changed, and more than once. Evoking a sense of things past, this lovingly researched and leisurely written book treats the ways Virginia Woolf was influenced both by the philosophy of Moore and Russell and by the aesthetics of Roger Fry. In doing so, Banfield seeks to rethink what she terms "the epistemology of modernism" by tracing the relationship and effects of analytic philosophy's sense-data theory and logical formalism. With no hard evidence that Woolf really read much of Moore and Russell's epistemological writings (though she did read Moore's Principia and heard at least one of Russell's public lectures), the author is also engaged in rethinking (thinking again) older thoughts about the nature of philosophical influence. Ideas may be in the air.