Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 627 by no means neglected. In sum, this book is truly a fine introduction to pragmatism, from its earliest articulation to a contemporary representative of undeniable influence. Murphy's Pragma~m is, however, marred by a serious shortcoming. For it does not acknowledge the continuity of the pragmatic tradition: the tradition recently rediscovered by Rorty and others is one upon which John E. Smith, John J. McDermott, Richard J. Bernstein, Ralph Sleeper, Peter Manicas, Eugene Fontinell and countless others have drawn for decades. The work of Smith, et aL suggests the ongoing, continuous character of a vital tradition whose importance is only now dawning on philosophers whose absorption in the problematic of analytic philosophy blinded them from seeing that pragmatism is not a fuzzy response to the most fundamental (i.e., foundational) philosophical questions. American pragmatism is rather a forceful challenge to the Cartesian-Kantian problematic to which, in effect, analytic philosophers no less than Husserlian phenomenologists have, for the most part unwittingly, subscribed (96-97). While it would be unfair to ask Professor Murphy to have introduced his students to the most recent and exciting developments within the pragmatic tradition--arguably, the work of Cornell West on the one hand and that of pragmatic feminists such as Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Marjorie Miller, etc., on the other--it seems quite fair to insist that the rediscovery of the pragmatic tradition has been a necessity only for those whose preoccupation with the linguistic turn kept them imprisoned in the very problematic Smith, McDermott, Bernstein, et al. avoided by being participants in this tradition from the very beginning. VINCENT COLAPIETRO Fordham University Nicholas Griffin. Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 41o. Cloth, $98.oo. Because philosophers are not always the most reliable guide to their philosophical past, prudence dictates that we not blindly follow their lead. Russell is a case in point. Looking back on his youthful enthusiasm for neo-Hegelianism, the mature Russell, judging that philosophy worthless, recommended its neglect. Future generations took him at his word. The result is what Nicholas Griffin refers to as "a gap in the historical record" (vii), and it is the filling of this gap that is Griffin's "chief purpose" in Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship. In this, he succeeds admirably. Griffin's book falls into two main parts. The second, which is much the longer and comprises five chapters, consists of detailed examinations of Russell's ambitious attempt to provide a neo-Hegelian analysis of the sciences; thus we find separate chapters on Geometry, Physics, Pure Mathematics, and Logic, with a final chapter on Relations. The opening three chapters, by contrast, offer a psycho-social backdrop against which Russell's philosophical ambitions can be viewed. Russell's early home life, his student years at Cambridge (including his membership in the Apostles and his courtship of Alys Pearsall Smith), the serious limitations of a late nineteenth-century 628 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:4 OCTOBER ~99 2 Cambridge education, the phenomenal pace at which he mastered contemporary mathematics after leaving Cambridge, and--not unimportandymhis "conversion" to Hegelianism are surveyed by Griffin with insight and humor. In these and subsequent pages Russell emerges as a more wholesome, less arrogant figure than the portrait sometimes drawn by others. When, just before the book's final chapter, Griffin remarks that Russell was "a generous man who tried to be fair" (3o8), there is good reason to believe that Griffin's rendering of Russell the man is closer to the truth than the one that pictures him as vain and uncaring. Russell went up to Cambridge in October 189o with the intention of studying mathematics. By 1893, however, he vowed never to study mathematics again, and even went so far as to sell his mathematics books. He felt, he would later write, "a certain disgust with mathematics," a revulsion which, however temporary, helped him find his way to the study of philosophy. He chose the Moral Science Tripos. His teachers included James Ward, G. F. Stout, and Henry Sidgwick. But while both Ward and Stout (but not Sidgwick) exercised some influence on his thought, it was his approximate contemporary...