Bibliographic record
Abstract
_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2601\REVIEWS.261 : 2006-06-05 11:55 eviews AN EPISTOLARY BIOGRAPHY S A Theology and Religious Studies / U. of Lund Lund, Sweden @. Nicholas Griffin, ed., assisted by Alison Roberts Miculan. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. Vol. : The Public Years, –. London and New York: Routledge, . Pp. xix, . Prices in : £. (pb £.); . (pb .). ith the publication of the second volume of The Selected Letters of WBertrand Russell, Nicholas Griffin has completed a work of impressive scholarship. The first volume came out in and contains letters, the second letters. The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University hold between thirty and forty thousand of Russell’s letters. Griffin does not claim to have looked through all of them, but apart from our editor he has probably read more of them than any other person. This provided him a unique perspective on Russell of which he has made the best. The letters have been intertwined with extensive commentaries and supplied with informative footnotes amounting to approximately pages in the first volume and pages in the second. Together with the prefaces and the introductions, they supply us with an epistolary biography of Russell that covers most aspects of his life. There are some differences between the first and the second volume due to the availability of letters. In the first volume there are many letters to Russell’s first wife, Alys, and his lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Griffin writes in the preface to the second volume that these touched on almost everything that was important to Russell, which made it unnecessary to look for letters elsewhere. The letters to Ottoline continued their pace until , but he kept on writing to her until she died in . Griffin relies heavily on these letters up to her premature death. When Colette O’Niel came into the picture in , she took over Ottoline’s role, but Russell’s letters to her are not quite as revealing as those to Ottoline. The Russell Archives have close to , letters to Ottoline and Reviewed by Katharine Tait in Russell, n.s. (): –. russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. (summer ): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. - _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2601\REVIEWS.261 : 2006-06-05 11:55 Reviews to Colette, and they contain much information for anyone interested in Russell. For the second volume Griffin has therefore been forced to search further afield for letters. At the same time there are many more letters to choose from. Another complicating factor has been the variety of Russell’s interests after . Before the First World War Russell had mainly devoted his energy to logic and the foundations of mathematics. When the war broke out, he channelled his energy into anti-war work. After the war his interests grew in many directions, as did the number of correspondents. Towards the end of his life he returned to political activism; still, his correspondence in the s covers a wider range of topics than at any other time. Given the variety of Russell’s interests, Griffin had to decide which interests should be included. This must have been a difficult task, but Griffin argues convincingly for why he has excluded letters directly related to Russell’s involvement in world government organizations, letters concerning the Indo-Pakistani border dispute and technical letters about philosophy. He has also excluded— although not totally—letters concerning religion, people he had known earlier, events he had been involved in and opinions he had held. Some topics had to be excluded due to the lack of suitable letters. In spite of all these restrictions, Griffin has been able to produce a most interesting, if not complete, epistolary biography. The book is divided into six chapters: () War (–), letters; () Children, Companionship, and Joint Work (–), letters; () Starting a School and Ending a Marriage (–), letters; () Marriage, Poverty, and Exile (–), letters; () Respectability at Last (–), letters; () Peace (–), letters. The titles and the periods are aptly chosen and give a good hint about the major projects in which Russell was involved. As can be deduced from the number of letters given for each chapter, Griffin devotes most attention to...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.313 | 0.166 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".