Whitehead and Russell: Odd Couple?

Whitehead and Russell: Odd Couple? Nikolay Milkov (bio) Christoph Kann and Dennis Sölch, eds. Whitehead und Russell: Perspektiven, Konvergenzen, Dissonanzen (Whitehead Studies, Vol. 8), Freiburg am Breisgau: Karl Alber, 2023. Pp. 332. isbn: 978-3-495-49026-6 (pb); 978-3-495-99583-9 (ebook), €74,00. This collection of ten chapters, published in 2023, is based on the fourth annual meeting of the German Whitehead Society1 held in January 2015 in Düsseldorf. The Society itself was set up in 2010 (unfortunately, there is no "German Bertrand Russell Society"). The anthology Whitehead und Russell (the anthology's editors make two thirds of the board of the Society) is the eighth of ten volumes already published in the Whitehead Studies series of Karl Alber Verlag—a publishing house of repute in Germanophone philosophy. As declared in the introduction, the anthology's objective is not to deliver a new inventory or new evaluation of the two philosophers and logicians. The fields in which Whitehead and Russell worked are too complex and too broad for this purpose. Instead, the book discusses selected themes, mainly of their theoretical philosophy (p. 22). Moreover, it does not follow chronological but systematic priorities—its objective is the "systematic reconstruction of the scientifically oriented metaphysics" of the two philosophers and logicians (p. 23). It is not difficult to notice, however, that the anthology is Whitehead oriented. Suffice it to say that in the list of abbreviations (p. 7ff.) twenty works of Whitehead are cited and not a single one of Russell. My general impression is that many of the authors of the volume have difficulty orienting themselves in End Page 114 Russell's philosophy. They are often biased in favour of Whitehead at the expense of Russell. For example, one of the editors of the book, Christoph Kann, states in the introduction: the fact that "in the biggest part of their reception history Whitehead remained in the shadow of his longstanding friend and colleague Russell, can be simply explained by . . . the enormous commercial success, in particular, of Russell's works in popular philosophy" (p. 9). Furthermore, for Dr. Kann, "Russell, with his penchant for stylistic niceties and popularization, did not prove himself to be an epitome Inbegriff of analytic philosophy—but rather as an occasionally unusual representative of this movement" (p. 11). In particular, Dr. Kann claims that Russell's "constructive analysis" (apparently, he means here Russell's use of the concept of "logical constructions") is not without alternatives in analytic philosophy. For example, there is also a "connective analysis" accurately described by Peter Strawson (p. 13). Of course there are alternatives to Russell's constructive analysis. However, Russell adhered to it only for a short period of time. Moreover, today, Strawson's connective analysis is anything but mainstream analytic philosophy. Finally, Russell's constructive analysis is not reductionist, as Dr. Kann maintains, but eliminativist.2 It is also difficult to understand why the author of the introduction sees George Stout as a Hegelian, along with John McTaggart, and so speaks of "Hegelians in Cambridge" at the fin de siècle (p. 15). In fact, there was only one Hegelian in Cambridge at that point in time and this was McTaggart. Stout was more of an "analytic psychologist" of Brentanoesque style. Next, Dr. Kann maintains that "Russell and Whitehead's orientation to English idealism went gradually down and was replaced by Russell's turn to the philosophy of common sense" (p. 17; my italics). As a matter of fact, Russell had great problems with Hegel's philosophy already when he read his Science of Logic for the first time in March 1897. Moreover, he radically—not gradually—broke with Hegelianism in April 1898.3 In the following years Russell did not orient himself to the English idealists at all—despite the fact that he often discussed the arguments of F. H. Bradley. Besides, Russell never adopted the philosophy of common sense. His friend G. E. Moore did this, but only after 1925. Furthermore, the author maintains that among the particulars in Russell's Principles of Mathematics (1903) are points of space and time and sense-data (p. 20). We all know, however, that Russell...