An Enlightenment Polymath, Updated

An Enlightenment Polymath, Updated John R. Lenz Chad Trainer. Reflections on Russell: Musings on a Multidimensional Man . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022. Pp. viii, 267. ISBN: 978-1-5275-7700-8; £61.99, us$99.95. Wwbrt: What would Bertrand Russell think? Numerous problems of knowledge of, and of how best to live in, the wider world (human and non-human) are probed in this multifaceted collection, another emanating from the Bertrand Russell Society (brs), of which Trainer is a former chair. The book consists of fifteen papers plus an introductory and a final essay. Seven papers concern Russell in the history of philosophy, two discuss religion, two science and technology, three social-political matters, and one contributes to biography with original reporting of the Russells’ time living in Pennsylvania in the 1940s. Fourteen were presented at brs meetings; some were published elsewhere. The discussions are rooted in the primary sources and always focus on points of relevance today. [End Page 187] The literature recognizes two Russells: the logical analyst and (say) the humanist (a label he himself did not like). A virtue of Trainer’s work is that he makes no such divide. His Russell is a wise Enlightenment polymath infused with logic (p. 1). The author often looks for juxtapositions. Several chapters concern the problem of knowledge, that is, of mind in the world. When Russell worked on his book on Leibniz, he still held a Platonic realist position that universals exist. Trainer argues that Russell’s criticisms of Leibniz blinded him to appreciating two views of Leibniz’s that he later came to adopt: conceptualism (universals as abstractions) and the use of Occam’s razor. Had he in 1899 realized that Leibniz was right, Russell’s development would have been speeded up, and Principia Mathematica would not have been necessary—an overbold assertion, given that their worldviews diverge fundamentally. In an honest footnote (p. 18), Trainer admits to some difficulties in Leibniz’s theory of universals. Russell turned to neutral monism when science cast doubt on the reality of matter. Trainer makes comparisons with Berkeley. Of course, Russell never doubted an external world. He was always an empiricist with qualifications. After he gave up on sense-data, he actually became more empiricist (1914–21) than earlier, Trainer argues. He shares Russell’s late view that “empiricism as a theory of knowledge has proved inadequate, though less so than any other previous theory of knowledge.”1 Still, I confess that Russell leaves readers in some confusion about the history of his different epistemological formulations, especially after he rejected the subject-object distinction. That said, for both Russell and Trainer, the promotion of empiricism, despite its complexities, amounts to a defence of the scientific method and of democracy; that is, real-world benefits recommend it. Does language help to grasp reality? Russell gave up (in 1919) his early idea that it does. (I would quibble with attributing such a view to Pythagoras or the Platonic Socrates. Their notions of truth are not in the first place theories of language.) He pioneered the criticism that language misleads us. Trainer finds, however (p. 41), that Russell continued to believe that properties of language reflect the structure of the world.2 He argues that Russell remains too fixated on language to do justice to “pre-verbal” knowing. In The Analysis of Matter, Russell questioned the notion of cause in physics, but in practice he continued to speak of cause, determinism, and a causal theory of perception. There is more here than the rift (common as it is) between the technical Russell and the colloquial writer. Russell constantly grapples [End Page 188] with the gulf between theoretical knowledge and the world of lived experience (e.g., quantum physics is true, but the old physics seems to work). For his way of bridging this gulf, Russell was dubbed “the passionate sceptic” by his first biographer, Alan Wood.3 Trainer calls him not a sceptic but a probabalist, whose legacy is continual inquiry with (rather) “caution and ... urgency” (p. 56). Science always leads the way with its piecemeal, tentative, progressive method. Trainer acutely points out (pp. 52–3 n.) that scepticism is...

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