100 Years of Logical Atomism

100 Years of Logical Atomism Graham Stevens Landon D. C. Elkind and Gregory Landini, eds. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: a Centenary Reappraisal. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xxvii, 343. €135.19; us$159.99. isbn: 978-3-319-94363-3. us$119.00 (ebook). A great benefit of studying Russell’s philosophy now is that we are temporally positioned to enjoy the benefits of so many centenaries of his most important works. Following on from the many high quality studies produced on the centenaries of The Principles, “On Denoting”, and Principia, we are now treated to a volume of similar quality inspired by the centenary of Russell’s lectures on the philosophy of logical atomism. These lectures, delivered some years after Principia and the Theory of Knowledge manuscript, but before the new direction he took in the 1920s, are a rich source of material for those seeking retrospective insight into the work he had recently left behind him, as well as that which he was looking towards and developing. The lectures have also fascinated (and often frustrated) those who seek a better understanding of the interaction between Russell and Wittgenstein, whose ideas regularly arise, explicitly and implicitly, in Russell’s discussions. [End Page 94] This volume tackles the challenging task of approaching the lectures, which are wide ranging in their topics, by a well-structured approach organizing the discussion around five themes: the history of Russell’s logical atomism, his influences, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and epistemology. These divisions are, of course, a little arbitrary and overlap, but the structure is helpful. Part One approaches the historical aspects in a way which, again, is helpfully organized, with the first paper (Elkind) focusing on the origins of Russell’s view, and the second (Landini) focusing more on providing a particular interpretation of the project Russell was embarked on. The third, and final, contribution to this section (Koç Maclean) is a discussion of the role of Russell’s logical atomism in his later works. This chapter one of the highlights of the book, in my view, exploring aspects of Russell’s (much) later philosophy that are all too often neglected, and making a careful case for the links back to the period of the lectures. Part Two, unsurprisingly, has a chapter devoted to the influence of Frege (Garavaso), and two devoted to that of Wittgenstein (Stern, Wahl). Part Three turns to the issue of Russell’s metaphysics. The most famous metaphysical doctrine of the lectures was Russell’s commitment to negative facts, and we are provided with two detailed studies of this aspect (Linsky, Perović). Before these two chapters, however, there is a discussion of Russell’s conception of fundamentality (Klement) and how this fits with contemporary views in metaphysics about ontological commitment. Klement does a superb job in this chapter of not only connecting Russell’s metaphysics to a major topic in current metaphysics—the nature of grounding—but also of drawing attention to the relevance of later works by Russell that are often overlooked as our attention is distracted by the 1903–18 period of his philosophical career. Language is the focus of Part Four. The first chapter (Korhonen) tackles the important question of when Russell ousted the multiple-relation theory of judgment from his semantics. Traditional interpretations of Russell hold that the theory was irrevocably destroyed and rejected in 1913 in light of objections from Wittgenstein. However, recent commentators have disputed this narrative, insisting that the theory survives in modified form in these lectures. Korhonen’s chapter is an important addition to this debate. Perhaps the most notorious linguistic doctrine of the lectures is Russell’s descriptivism, according to which proper names in ordinary language are understood as disguised definite descriptions and therefore subject to analysis by the celebrated theory of descriptions. The near universal consensus among philosophers of language is that Russell was wrong, and that theory must be rejected. The second chapter in this part (Orilia) swims against the tide here by insisting that the doctrine can survive the objections commonly taken to refute it, so long as we first excise Russell’s subjectivism from that doctrine. Subjectivism is the view that the description that provides...

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