BERTRAND RUSSELL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 510, 1 April 1949, Page 5

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Sir,-In your issue of March 18, Mr. Prior speaks of the "gossipy greatness" of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. ‘This estimate of the book, in my opinion, is wide of the mark, The

book is certainly gossipy, but the only elements of greatness I can discern in it are its bulk and the author’s selfassurance, which is colossal. Plato, according to Russell, "is hardly ever intellectually honest," and Socrates is "dishonest and _ sophistical"; ‘ "everything Aristotle said on scientific subjects proved an obstacle to progress": "any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciples," etc., etc. Russell devotes a great deal of his space to political, social, and religious history, and these are fields in which he has no special competence. As an illustration of his lack of historical sense there is his statement that the existence of David and Solomon is "probable." He fails as an historian of philosophy because there is far too much criticism in his book. He tells the reader what he thinks about the ideas of various philosophers, when the reader wants to know what the ideas were. The historian can never be absolutely objective, but Russell, even by the most generous standards, is excessively subjective. Either because of laziness or through lack of sympathy, his account of the philosophical views of Augustine and Aquinas is hopelessly inadequate. However, although the book is not to be taken seriously as a history of philosophy, it is interesting as an account of the views of Bertrand Russell, who perhaps unwittingly, puts his philosophy in a nutshell on page 618, where he writes: "There is a general belief (which I have never understood) that it is better to exist than not to exist."

G.H.

D.

(Greenmeadows).