Bertrand Russell (review)

aOOK REVIEWS 677 minor flaws in Sleeper's historical discussion are perhaps worth mentioning. He claims (56) that Dewey brought James H. Tufts into his Michigan department along with Mead in 1891; in fact, Mead arrived that year to fill the vacancy created by Tufts' departure for Germany. Further, Sleeper gives Mead and James R. Angell a good deal more credit for influencing Dewey's naturalistic turn in the early 189os than can be justified by the relevant evidence. Sleeper's comparison of Dewey's pragmatism with that of Peirce and James is enlightening, as is his attempt to show the coherence of Dewey's philosophy. In this connection his discussion of Dewey's theory of inquiry is especially good; his analysis of Dewey's ontology and metaphysics, by contrast, is not as convincing. More should be said at this juncture to clarify the exact respects in which Dewey goes beyond a metaphysics of experience to what Sleeper regards as a metaphysics and ontology of existence. GARY A. COOK Beloit College Paul Grimley Kuntz. Bertrand Russell. Twayne's English Authors Series. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. Pp. 186. $14.95. According to a mischievous but well known story, a student once asked Bertrand Russell for a historical account of the origins of philosophical discussions on ethics. Russell, it is told, thought for a moment and replied: "I believe that Moore and I first discussed the subject in 19o2." This anecdote caricatures a well established view of Russell as the revolutionary who had done away with the past and initiated the transformation of philosophy from a grandiose attempt to discover the design of the cosmos to a more modest and manageable project of analysis of meanings. Paul Grimley Kuntz's short volume Bertrand Russell argues that this view of Russell as the nemesis of the past is mistaken and that if all of his writings are studied as a unified whole he can be shown to be a faithful exponent of the metaphysical tradition which he is alleged to have undermined. Kuntz is aware of the fact that he is disagreeing with the majority of Russell's interpreters and even with Russell's own interpretation of his work. He is not the first to do this, for everyone, except professional philosophers, assumed that Russell was a philosopher of the old school, that is, a sage who offered wisdom on the meaning of life. But few have articulated this interpretation of Russell as boldly and with as much detail as has Kuntz. Kuntz's governing ideas, namely that Russell's writings can best be understood as a conflict between contending theologies or that his refusal to develop a modern metaphysic like Whitehead's was due to a failure of nerve, will infuriate some, but Kuntz's skillful use of these concepts as hermeneutic tools as well as his willingness to consider a wide range of topics gives the reader a lively picture of Russell's enterprise. Kuntz links his early chapters on Russell's epistemology, on his logic of relations, and his views on language and on metaphysics to the later chapters on morals, politics, and religion by showing that each topic follows a similar pattern of development. The schema sketches the stages of Russell's growth, a growth that is dialectical as Kuntz 678 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:4 OCTOBER 1988 portrays it, as it proceeds from Russell's beginnings as an Hegelian idealist until Bradley 's Monism impels him into revolution, that is, into philosophical analysis, until finally---disturbed by the direction the new philosphies of logical analysis and pragmatism were taking--he developed new positions in which he moved closer and closer to the tradition of metaphysics. A good example of Kuntz's method is chapter four on "Words and the World" and chapter five on "Metaphysics: Knowledge of a Real Order?" In chapter four he argues that Russell developed Logical Analysis and Logical Atomism to save "simples" from being devoured by Bradley's philosophical Idealism. By 194o, however, Russell had come to the conclusion that Wittgenstein and his followers had transformed philosophical analysis into an end in itself. He insisted that analysis must be supplemented by...