Russell - A Very Short Indroduction Read Online Free PDF

successful book from a popular and financial point of view. Russell sued for breach of contract and gave the manuscript to the judge to read. He won his case. It must be said that parts of this famous book are sketchy enough to make one feel a certain sympathy with the Philadelphia millionaire. But in other respects it is a marvellously readable, magnificently sweeping survey of Western thought, distinctive for placing it informatively into its historical context. Russell enjoyed writing it, and the enjoyment shows; his later remarks about it equally show that he was conscious of its shortcomings.
    Work on the History was continued in the library of Bryn Mawr College after Russell’s break with Barnes. This was owing to the kindness of Professor Paul Weiss who invited Russell there while he awaited permission from the British Embassy in Washington to return to England. Trinity College had offered Russell a Fellowship, which, together with a handsome advance for the History , rescued Russell from his difficulties. Just before sailing home through the dangers of German submarines in the Atlantic, Russell spent a short time at Princeton, where he had discussions with Einstein, Kurt Gödel, and Wolfgang Pauli. For the next few years Russell taught in Cambridge, publishing the History in 1945 and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits in 1948. This was Russell’s last great work of philosophy, and he was disappointed when it received little notice from the philosophical community. One reason for this he attributed to the considerable vogue then and for some time afterwards enjoyed by Wittgenstein’s ideas. In 1949, a year which he described as the ‘apogee of his respectability’, his Fellowship at Trinity was changed to a Fellowship for life without teaching duties; he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the British Academy; the BBC invited him to give the first ever series of Reith Lectures; King George VI gave him the Order of Merit; and in the following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, news of which reached him while he was on yet another visit to the United States.
    Russell was pleased to be given the OM, and went to Buckingham Palace for the investiture. King George was embarrassed at having to behave graciously to an iconoclastic ex-convict adulterer, who in addition was – in his own words – so ‘queer looking’, so he said, ‘You have sometimes behaved in a way which would not do if generally adopted.’ The reply that sprang to Russell’s lips, but which he managed to suppress, was, ‘Like your brother’, meaning the abdicated Edward VIII; instead he said, ‘How a man should behave depends upon his profession. A postman, for instance, should knock at all the doors in a street at which he has letters to deliver, but if anybody else knocked on all the doors, he would be considered a public nuisance.’ The King hastily changed the subject ( A 516–17).
    Russell’s new respectability, and in particular his long-standing opposition to the communism of the Soviet Union, made him useful to the British Government in the deepening chill of the Cold War. In this capacity he visited Germany and Sweden to lecture, on the latter occasion being involved in a seaplane crash in Trondheim harbour, which necessitated his having to swim to safety through freezing water; and on the former being temporarily made a member of the British Armed Forces, to his great amusement.
    Russell travelled widely in the 1950s – to Australia, to India, to America again, as well as to continental Europe and Scandinavia – lecturing all the while, and enjoying considerable celebrity. Three years after separating from Peter Spence he married his long-standing American friend, Edith Finch, and they made a honeymoon to Paris; but even on sightseeing jaunts around the city – which neither had ever explored as tourists, for the good reason that both had previously lived there – Russell was recognized and crowds