Boo ks
HOME IS WHERE ONE STARTS FROM
A
HISTORY oF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY.
By
Bertrand Russell. Simon
&
Schuster.
$5.00.
J
UDGED
AS a conventional history of philosophy, this book, in spite
of individually admirable essays, is inferior to most of those already
on the market. Judged in terms of Russell's stated purpose-"to exhibit
philosophy as an integral part of social and political life"-it is a com–
plete failure. These facts have been sufficiently indicated by some of the
more immediate reviewers, and there seems no point in repeating.
What remains, and what alone and very much makes the book
worth reading, is its expression, quite probably the last major expression,
of
Bertra~d
Russell, a fascinating human being and the most noted of
living philosophers. The turn of a syllogism can, as well as a metaphor,
reveal a soul; philosophies also, with the most impalpable of all mediums,
are works of art.
By writing a history, Russell shows how remarkably lacking he is
in the historical sense. He keeps his promise to give "more account of
general history than is usually given by historians of philosophy." But
the quantitatively large addition is not enough to make a history of
philosophy historical. The many pages of social and political history
might just as well be bound separately. He never discloses any but
obvious and long known correlations between societies and their philoso–
phies. There was no need for 900 new pages to tell us that Plato was
impressed by Sparta, that medieval philosophy was linked to the Church,
and that post-Renaissance thought has been greatly influenced by science.
It is curious, for example, to find not a sentence about the demon–
strable historical connections between the medieval problem of "univer–
sals," on the one hand, and, on the other, Church dogma, Church organ–
ization, and, from the fourteenth century, the growth of nationalism and
the capitalist commodity market. The references to "subjectivism" in
modern formal philosophy hardly hint at its long development in so
many areas of social experience: mysticism, Protestant doctrine and
practice, the "individualist" position of the capitalist entrepreneur or
the atomized "citizen" of a nation-state, the slow vast shift in literature
and the other arts. Several chapters (not uninteresting in themselves)
describe the growth of the power of the medieval papacy, which had
little significant effect on philosophy; but nowhere does Russell consider
possible relations between the medieval philosophers' "great chain of
