First published 1946. Unwin, paperback, 1981, pp 842 (including index of pp 51), c.390,000 words (main text).
This is a heavyweight book, and not just its length but also in terms of scope and the concentration required to follow what is being said – at least for the non-philosopher. Russell is attempting to place the development of philosophy from ancient Athens to the time of writing in ‘its connection with political and social circumstances’ [p5]. He has chosen the philosophers he considers have contributed most to the advancement (or diversion) of philosophical thought and places them in the context of their times and predecessors, usually giving brief biographies. It becomes clear that every philosopher is a product of their moment in history and they have constructed their thought to fit the prevailing political and cultural circumstances.
What is philosophy? Early on Russell says that ‘philosophy … is something intermediate between theology and science.’ [p13] Towards the end he writes: ‘Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts inharmoniously blended: on the one hand a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living. The failure to separate the two with sufficient clarity has been the source of much confused thinking.’ [p788] From the way Russell sets it out every one of his philosophers has had confused thinking which has allowed each succeeding one to detect flaws in their predecessors’ arguments and so tear down all that has gone before, only to construct a whole new tottering edifice. Most have thought deeply about how we know what we think we know, and what if anything is true. They have studied the finer points of language as it expresses their ideas. One wonders how the particular language they used influenced their conclusions. Russell gives an occasional example of where a word in one language can have subtle meanings that are lost when translated. Most philosophers have constructed elaborate theories to justify some system of religion, ethics or politics – often all three.
Russell seems to assume considerable prior knowledge in the reader about at least the basic terminology of the subject. He doesn’t include any descriptions of terms. Explanations often emerge from the text, sometimes considerably after they have first been mentioned. Philosophical jargon includes ‘ontology’, ‘epistemology’, ‘teleological’, ‘eschatology’, ’dialectic’, ‘essence’, ‘universals’, ‘syllogistic reasoning’, ‘logos’, ‘principle of individuation’, etc., which are probably all terms that a first-year philosophy undergraduate should come to understand.
The book is divided into three sections: Ancient, Catholic and Modern. The first part deals with the ancient Greeks. Who knows if there were philosophers before this? Probably, but luckily either they didn’t write it down or their writing hasn’t survived. The only ancients Russell thinks were vaguely on the right track was Democritus and the Atomists who tried to base their thinking on observable facts rather than ‘self-evident axioms’ which rarely hold water when studied closely, and to a limited extent, Aristotle. Russell eviscerates most of the rest of the Greeks, especially Plato. They come across as a bunch of chaps who didn’t need to work but enjoyed arguing with each other and cooking up fantastic explanations of why the world is at it appears. Russell isn’t any fonder of most of the Catholic philosophers who were intent on justifying the existence of the church while enjoying demolishing the teaching of their predecessors, but who were circumscribed by fear of the inquisition. The Moderns fair little better. He has some time for Machiavelli because of the complete honesty with which he writes. It is not until Locke when a breath of fresh air arrives along with empiricism. Russell seems to have time for Locke, devoting three chapters to him; no one else gets more than one. However, Locke has his limits and despite writing in a letter ‘You and I have had enough of this kind of fiddling’ [p589] descends into fiddling after his early blast of illumination. Philosophy soon retreats back into counting the number of angels that can fit on a pin head, and Russell has a special place in hell set aside for Rousseau and the romantics for which he blames so many ills of his time, notably the abandonment of evidence and the rise of excessive feeling and self-absorption (shades of this day too, I fear). Russell wrote much of this book during the second world war, and so Hitler was clearly much on his mind.
The last few philosophers were largely unknown to me. Bergson was French and Russell has no time for him as he was developing romantic philosophy. William James (brother of the better-known novelist, Henry) and John Dewey were both Americans, included perhaps as that nation provided his original audience.
The book is based on a series of lectures Russell gave to the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania in the USA. Sometimes it reads a little as though it is a direct transcript of his lectures. It maybe that his writing style was developed as an academic giving lectures. Despite my criticism of the lack of an index of terms, it is mostly well written, with the occasional amusing barbed criticism. It bares slow and careful reading, however, because the subject matter is dense. It might have been helpful to give a brief, one sentence, summary of each character’s philosophy and how it added to or demolished what had gone before. One needs a good memory to keep straight the differences between Parmenides and Protagoras, Augustine and Aquinas, and Bacon and Berkeley.
Is philosophy important? As one man demolishes his predecessors work, and all they are arguing about are universals, which most of us have no trouble understanding and using correctly in our everyday conversation, it would seem not. On the other hand a figure like Karl Marx might seem to have had a tremendous impact for good or ill in the twentieth century. Or was he just a straw in a wind that was already blowing strongly and his writing simply became the label attached to much political turmoil? How many of those revolutionaries had actually read him, or did they merely fancy their chances of grabbing power for themselves?
There is not a single woman philosopher in this entire collection. Of course in the ancient world women weren’t considered worthy of education or allowed to engage in civic life. Christianity excluded women from the priesthood, as does Catholicism to this day, cutting them off from the principle source of education and philosophical debate for the best part of two thousand years. Even as Russell was writing this, women were largely excluded from tertiary education. Mary Wollstonecraft might have deserved at least a mention. A search for ‘great women philosophers’ brings up a few names from the ancient and medieval worlds but all that seems to be known about them are a few thoughts on the nature of love. This is a subject that hasn’t concerned the male philosophers in Russell’s book, which is perhaps surprising given its profound importance in most of our lives and its mysteries. Russell was himself a free-thinker on the subject. Nearly all the names from that search are from the twentieth century. Truly we live in better times.
There is a very brief concluding chapter on ‘Logical Analysis’ which was Russell’s own subject. It says that mathematically derived proofs have now been made to some of the ancient questions, but he leaves that hanging. The completeness of those proofs might be questioned in the light to the limits of knowledge as laid out in du Sautoy’s What We Cannot Know.
At the end of the day this is a thought-provoking book. It was very successful, allegedly providing Russell with a pension for the rest of his long life and is still in print more than seventy years later. I suspect that it is like A Brief History of Time – both bought in their thousands but destined to remain mostly amongst the great unread books.
© William John Graham, October 2022