Abstracts of papers accepted for the meeting Check https://sites.google.com/site/alanschwerinsphilosophycorner/home/annual-meeting-of-the-brs-for-2014 for the most up-to-date list. “A Lovelorn Orphan in a Cold World": Bertrand Russell’s 1931 North American Lecture Tour Michael D. Stevenson, Department of History, Lakehead University The recent availability of Bertrand Russell’s correspondence with his third wife, Patricia (“Peter”) Spence, has provided important new insight into two extensive speaking tours Russell conducted in Scandinavia in 1935 and in the United States in 1939. This paper will document Russell’s two-month lecture tour of the United States and Canada in late 1931 based on Russell’s written communication with Peter. If the 1935 Scandinavian tour documented Russell’s return to philosophy and the 1939 American tour detailed Russell’s evolving views of pacifism, his 1931 tour letters provide a fresh perspective on his turbulent private life. Russell’s nascent romantic relationship with Peter—who had been hired as the governess to Russell’s children in 1930—stands in sharp contrast to the cooling of his affection for Dora Russell, his second wife who during Russell’s tour was pregnant with a child fathered by Griffin Barry. In addition to Russell’s complex and fluid relationships with Peter and Dora, an examination of the 1931 tour allows for an enhanced understanding of Russell’s financial and legal troubles at the height of the Great Depression and an appreciation of the remarkable array of personal friendships and casual acquaintances Russell maintained during this period. Strange Bedfellows? Russell and Churchill Michael E. Berumen: Independent Scholar The two great contemporaries, both aristocrats with famous ancestries, both often controversial in their time, and both with many opponents, and, often enough, on the "outs" with erstwhile allies, have some very obvious differences, but also have many similarities in biography, character, and personality. In the end, one was one of the greatest champions for liberalism in the 20th century, while the other can be said to have had the most important role in saving it from the abyss. Russell on Controlling Human Passions and Impulses: What Can be Done to Eliminate War? David Blitz and D’Juan Garland Eastman Contemplating the tragedy of the Great War, Russell wrote, among other books and articles on the subject, Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916, retitled in the US as Why Men Fight) in order to diagnose the problem of political violence and put forward a solution. This paper will examine the model of the human psyche which he considered: one in which reason plays a secondary role in political life to passions and where desires, which feature the rational pursuit of goals, are subordinated to impulses, both destructive and constructive. The destructive impulses lead to violence and war; while the constructive impulses lead to peace and wellbeing. The problem for Russell is how to favor the constructive impulse. He proposes a “principle of growth” to be enshrined in political institutions in order to promote the vitality of individuals and their communities, favoring creativity over conformity and channeling destructive impulses into creative ones. This paper will examine how plausible such a model of the human psyche is, taking into account ideas from William James’ “Moral Equivalent of War “(which Russell favorably reviewed) and Sigmund Freud’s essay—in response to a question from Einstein similar to Russell’s concerns—“Why War” that raises difficulties regarding the repressive nature of civilization for the proposal Russell makes in Why Men Fight. D’Juan Garland Eastman, a recent philosophy graduate at CCSU and veteran of the US Marines, will respond to issues raised in the paper, and provide a commentary. Against the Crimes of Silence, Forgetfulness and Revisionism Stefan Andersson: Independent Scholar On Memorial Day, May 28, 2012 President Obama gave a speech in Washington to launch the “Vietnam War Commemoration Project.” According to Michael Uhl http://www.inthemindfield.com/2012/06/27/heeding-the-call/) this was "The first blow to the memory of our antiwar GI and veteran struggles in this revisionist farce ... Obama’s myth-driven speech is a testament to his abysmal ignorance of this period of our history; or he was simply pandering to a selected audience of true-believer vets gathered at the Wall, who have succumbed to the pernicious view that the war they could never have defended in youth had become, with the salve of passing years, a noble cause." I will talk about how Ralph Schoenman upon the news (in late November 1969) of the My Lai massacre started the Citizens Commission of Inquiry into United States War Crimes in Indochina (CCI). Early in 1970, Tod Ensign and Jeremy Rifkin, of the New Left, took over the CCI to document war crimes in Indochina. They were soon joined by Michael Uhl. Although Richard Falk never became a regular member of the CCI, he was an inspiration to a lot of the young war resisters. I will show how Falk in many ways became a prominent ambassador of the Russell Tribunal and the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, which was founded in 1979 after Lelio Basso's death and inspired by the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples at Algiers (also named the Algiers Declaration). In my research I've found more than 70 publications by Falk on the Vietnam war. In 20 of these he brings up the importance of the Russell-Sartre Tribunal. See my bibliography in Russell n.s. 31 (winter 2011-12): 167-87. The Grandfather, the Godfather and the War Between the States: John Russell and John Stuart Mill’s Role in the American Civil War Tim Madigan Amanda Foreman’s recent book A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random House, 2010) describes the often-tortured diplomatic relationships between the British government and the rival governments of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Lincoln feared that Britain would recognize the Confederacy as a bona fide belligerent nation, thereby negating his claim that it was a renegade group of states, whereas Davis – who knew how dependent the British economy was on Southern cotton – understood clearly that without such recognition (which would include the right to purchase war materials) the Southern Cause was likely doomed. Interestingly enough, one of the main characters detailed in Foreman’s book is Bertrand Russell’s grandfather, Lord John Russell, who served as British Foreign Secretary throughout the War. In this talk, I will discuss Lord Russell’s crucial role in the conflict, as well as the arguments made by several people – including Bertrand Russell’s godfather, John Stuart Mill, who was then a member of the British Parliament – that regardless of the economic consequences of not supporting the Confederacy, Britain had a moral obligation to side with the Union, especially after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation made it clear that abolishing slavery was the central issue of the war. Special emphasis will be given to Bertrand Russell’s own analysis of the American Civil War in his 1934 Freedom and Organization: 1814-1914. Master Class Reading: Ayer on Russell Chad Trainer: Independent Scholar We usually think of an important difference between Bertrand Russell and the British empiricist tradition as being their respective views on the metaphysical status of universals. To be sure, the work for which Russell is most famous certainly abounds in realism. Generally, conventional accounts lead us to believe that there was until the very end of Russell’s philosophic activity a residue of realism. I understand A.J. Ayer, however, as encouraging us to see Russell as having forsaken realism to an almost Humean degree. This is important because, if Ayer is correct, it renders much of the tension between Russell and Humeans more apparent than real. To what extent is it accurate to understand Russell’s own philosophical development as increasingly conceptualist in its orientation and so increasingly empiricist?Reading for Master Class Reading for Trainer Master Class Meditations on, Inquiry into, and Critique of Pure: "Logic as the Essence of Philosophy Billy Joe Lucas: Independent Scholar I will discuss some logics inspired by or using Russell’s logics as a way to reinterpret concepts of philosophy in key historical figures and in our contemporary curricula. Thus an overview of how BR changed our discipline, quite apart from theories of logicism or mathematical foundations will be presented. e.g., a common division of Philosophy into subfields: Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic, Theory of Knowledge will be considered. I will give an overview of a cluster of logics that define clusters of alternative precise concepts of knowledge (and its constituent parts) and similarly with Ethics and Metaphysics. It thus follows that these subfields overlap substantially with logic. Logic is an essence of Philosophy. Techie results may be mentioned, but no significant knowledge of logic is required as background to my paper. While England (and Russell) Slept: the Start of World War I Ken Blackwell: Bertrand Russell Archives/Research Centre, McMaster University Correspondence just prior to August 4, 1914 shows that Russell, in company with almost everyone else outside the Foreign Office, was unaware of the serious state of international relations. I will read extracts from letters, both newly acquired and ones long familiar to researchers, and relate his experience to his later political watchfulness—even to his possible exculpation of Sir Edward Grey's secret diplomacy. Russell’s Paradox: Still a Problem for Set Theory Edward Ferrier: University of Massachusetts I consider three replies to Russell’s paradox for sets: Cantorian limitation of size, Russell’s set restrictivism and the iterative conception. The first two can be seen as attempts to restore consistency to the “nai¨ve” conception of set as the extension of a concept. The third provides an alternative conception of set as a collection built up from its elements. I argue that while each of these replies can be used to block the derivation of Russell’s paradox, all of them face formidable philosophical objections. The objection to set restrictivism appears to be particularly damning. The restrictivist denies the possibility of quantification over absolutely all sets, yet her denial seems to involve an instance of quantification over absolutely all sets. I end with a tentative proposal for how to address this worry. Two letters David Shier: Washington State University Last fall I discovered two fascinating letters in the personal libraries of Virginia and Leonard Woolf (housed at Washington State University)—one of them labeled from Russell to Virginia, and the other from G.E. Moore to Leonard. I want to share them with the society.The "Russell" letter turned out not to be from Russell, but instead an urgent apology from another author (signature illegible) to Virginia Woolf. I was able ultimately to determine the author and the act for which he was so contrite, and there is a bit of an interesting story there. But more significant is the 1909 letter from Moore, in which he candidly describes his writing process and his distaste for writing philosophy. It is a remarkable letter, not the least because it may shed some light on Moore’s writing style, often described as tedious and nitpicking. Whitehead's Bewildering Denial of Modus Ponens in Principia's Vol. 2 Greg Landini: University of Iowa It is not often realized that in November 1910 Whitehead called a halt to the printing of Volume 2 of Principia Mathematica. He found that "sm" is ambiguous. It can change its meaning in its different occurrences in a proposition. He altered some pages of Volume 1, and with Russell consumed by Ottoline, revised Volume 2 with an indefensible denial of Modus Ponens! V. J. McGill's Critique of Russell's Political and Economic Philosophy in Retrospect Tom Riggins: New York University In The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell volume in the Library of Living Philosophers (1944), V.J. McGill (1897-1977) published a detailed critique of Russell's political and economic philosophy. Russell was not pleased and made short shrift of professor McGill's efforts in his "Reply to Criticisms". Russell dismisses McGill's contribution as dealing with material "lying wholly outside philosophy" and says, in effect, he won't even bother to argue against McGill's positions as it would be "futile." Seventy years later, in retrospect, we might agree with Russell that his efforts to refute McGill would have been "futile." But why would they have been? This paper will attempt to answer this question by showing that McGill's critique was essentially correct and Russell simply wished to dodge the issues McGill raised. [At the time McGill was on the faculty of Hunter College. In the 1950s he suffered a worse attack on his academic freedom than even Russell endured in the City College affair. McGill was stripped of his associate professorship and fired from Hunter for refusing to provide a list of names to the McCarthy Committee of "subversives" he had known in the '30s and '40s when he was active in progressive causes (he was a member of the CPUSA in the '30s but resigned in 1941).] The Russell-Dummett Correspondence on Frege and his Nachlass Kevin C. Klement, UMass—Amherst Russell corresponded with Sir Michael Dummett (1925-2011) between 1953 and 1963 while the latter was working on a book on Frege, eventually published as Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973). In their letters they discuss Russell's correspondence with Frege, translating it into English, as well as Frege's attempted solution to Russell's paradox in the appendix to vol. 2 of his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. After Dummett visited the University of M?nster to view Frege's Nachlass, he sent reports back to Russell concerning both the philosophical materials Frege left behind, as well as information from Frege's journal revealing his anti-semitic political opinions. Their interaction contains interpretive conjectures and insights on Dummett's side, and some dark humor on Russell's.