Volume 48, Number 8 · May 17, 2001
He Had His Ups and Downs
By Stuart Hampshire
Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970
Ray Monk
Free Press, 574 pp., $40.00
Volume I of Ray Monk's admirable biography of Bertrand Russell, subtitled 'The Spirit of Solitude,' ends in 1921, precisely at the high point of Russell's purely intellectual life. Although he published several works of academic philosophy in later years—the last of them, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), was written in his seventies—none was an exciting and enduring contribution to the subject, not even An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1938), which was the best of them. Monk describes how Wittgenstein totally and finally destroyed Russell's confidence in his philosophical program, and in effect expelled him from his own Garden of Eden, which was mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein had argued that there could be no complete foundation for human knowledge, whether in mathematics or in other domains.
Review, 2615 words
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