Passion of a sceptic

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking. Its aim is to print in a uniform edition every short (ie less than book-length) piece of work that Russell ever wrote, each piece introduced, annotated and supplied with a detailed textual analysis. When - or, perhaps, if - completed, it will comprise about 30 volumes, containing several thousand articles, papers and reviews. After volume one, which contains Russell's juvenilia, the collection is organised into two series: volumes two to 11 containing his philosophical work, and volumes 12 onwards containing his social, political and personal writing. Up to now, 12 volumes have been produced, every one a model of diligent scholarship and handsome production. Especially magnificent is the accompanying three-volume bibliography that was published last year, and which surely ranks among the finest scholarly bibliographies ever produced.

After a sporadic start, the volumes in the first series have been appearing at an encouraging rate over the last few years. The publication of volume 10 leaves just two gaps to be filled: volume 5, which will cover 1906-8, and volume 11, which will gather Russell's relatively small output of philosophical writing during his last 28 years. The second, non-philosophical series has shown a more orderly progress: volume 12 (1902-14) appeared in 1985, volume 13 (1914-16) in 1988, and now volume 14 brings us up to 1918. Broadly speaking, as Russell's philosophical output declined, his political output in-creased, so the 52 years yet to go in this series constitute an awesomely huge mountain to climb.

By common consent, and in Russell's own opinion, his best philosophical work was done before the first world war. After the war, he deliberately chose a career in journalism and popular writing in favour of the five-year lectureship offered him by Trinity College, Cambridge. He did not return to academic life until 1938, when, at the age of 66, he took up a post at the University of Chicago. It is little surprise, therefore, that, among the 69 articles and reviews collected in volume 10, there is much that is ephemeral and lightweight. Of most interest are the series of papers Russell wrote between 1935 and 1938, when, disillusioned with the life he had led with his second wife, Dora, and sick of writing journalism and pot-boilers, he sought to re-establish his reputation as a serious philosopher.

The papers he wrote during this period are not as well known as they deserve to be. "The Limits of Empiricism", read to the Aristotelian Society in 1936, is especially interesting, representing, as it does, an attempt by Russell to engage with what he took to be the views of the later Wittgenstein. Roughly half of the paper consists of an attack on Alice Ambrose's article, "Finitism in Mathematics", which - much to Wittgenstein's annoyance - was widely regarded as expressing the views that Wittgenstein was at that time developing in his lectures at Cambridge. The importance Russell attached to this paper, and the difficulty he had in writing it, emerge from the copious notes, false starts, and preliminary draft, which are reproduced here in an appendix.

The question at issue in Russell's discussion of finitism (the view that talks of infinite totalities, such as the set of all numbers, as meaningless) is whether we can see, in some sense, truths which cannot be finitely established. For example, can we see that, given any number, N, there is a greater number, N+1? If we can, and if any is to have its usual meaning, then, Russell argues, finitism is false. This puts a limit on empiricism, he claims, because it obliges us to recognise that, in some cases, we can see things for which there are no corresponding "sense data". Similarly, in physics, we have to see things which go beyond immediate sense experience. When we observe three successive events, we see the temporal relations between them: first A, then B, then C. This last example was expanded by Russell in "On Order in Time", a formidably technical paper he read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1936.

The themes outlined in "The Limits of Empiricism" were explored further by Russell in two further papers to the Aristotelian Society: "On Verification" and "The Relevance of Psychology to Logic". In both he campaigns against the tendency of modern analytical philosophers to discuss language in isolation from the facts it describes, or, to put it another way, the tendency to emphasise questions of meaning at the expense of the traditional problems of knowledge. It was always Russell's view that these latter are the true concern of the philosopher, a view that informs the interesting series of reviews and articles reprinted here in which he takes issue with the work of scientific popularisers, such as Eddington and Jeans, for encouraging the idea that modern physics had in some way abandoned its claim to establish objective facts about the external world and was thus more compatible with a religious outlook than the materialistic science of an earlier era.

Such an idea was anathema to Russell, and in yet another group of papers collected here - including one of his most famous lectures, "Why I Am Not A Christian" - the incompatibility of religion and science plays a key role in his famous scepticism about religious dogmas.

Russell's adherence to objective facts, science and rationality had a strong moral as well as a purely intellectual motivation, and some of the best essays in this collection, such as "The Ancestry of Fascism", show him recoiling from the irrationalism that dominated the politics of the 1930s and seeking to understand its intellectual history. In these essays, as in much of the work reproduced here, Russell consciously swam against the tide, but for this he should be applauded, not derided, since the tide was - and is - an evil one.

The papers collected in volume 14 show Russell swimming - with extraordinary vigour - against another evil tide: the mounting bloodshed of the last two years of the first world war. These are the years of Russell's leadership of the No-Conscription Fellowship, his initial enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution, and his attempts to articulate a democratic and internationalist socialism that would prevent such wars in the future. The sheer quantity of his writing is impressive (as much collected here over two years as there is in volume 10, which covers 15 years), but more so is the clear-sightedness, humanity and passion expressed. The editors have done a marvellous job in arranging this wealth of material, bringing to their task a detailed knowledge of the historical context and a judicious assessment of Russell's political judgement. They have produced, as well as essential reading for any serious student of Russell's work, an invaluable source for historians of the first world war, of popular peace movements and of the history of British socialism.

"As much as Russell adopts the style of a journalist responding to the shifting concerns of the day," the editors of volume 14 remark, "the philosopher in (him) is almost unconsciously at work." One of the many merits of these volumes - and of the Collected Papers as a whole - is that they demonstrate, in ways that may be surprising, the unity of Russell's concerns, whether he was writing on philosophy, science, politics, religion, ethics or himself. The motto for both volumes may be taken from the "wildly paradoxical and subversive" doctrine he famously advocated in his essay, "On the Value of Scepticism", reprinted in volume 10: "The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."

Ray Monk is senior lecturer in philosophy, University of Southampton.