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This issue of the Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, the “Russell and Nietzsche” issue, deals with a topic that might at first surprise the reader. “Russell and Nietzsche? What on earth could be the connection there?” In fact there is probably more than one interesting connection between the two, and the one focused on in this issue will, we hope, be of special interest to many of the Quarterly’s readers. In his article “Nietzsche’s Anticipation of Russell,” Steve Sullivan puts his finger on a surprising identity between the two. Like Russell, Nietzsche endorsed Hume’s view of the soul – that there is no unchanging, unperceived substratum that is the metaphysical subject of all the varying mental qualities that we experience (e.g., perceptions, memories, or emotions). But more than this and also like Russell, Nietzsche attributed the belief that there is such a substratum at least in part to the misleadingness of subject-predicate grammar. Russell is famous for criticizing subject-predicate grammar as misleading. He is, in fact, usually thought by analytic philosophers to have originated the view. For example, Peter Hylton claims: After “On Denoting”, [Russell] comes to assume that analysis of a sentence will generally reveal that it expresses a proposition of a quite different logical form.... A consequence of Russell’s new view is that he comes to take it for granted that our ordinary language is generally misleading.... Here we have a crucial contribution to an important theme in twentieth century analytic philosophy quite generally: the idea that language is systematically misleading in philosophically significant ways. (Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, 2003, pp. 223-4)No hint is given of this being a standard subject of discussion before Russell. But what the correlation between Russell’s and Nietzsche’s views suggests is that in fact there is an intellectual iceberg to be discovered of which these two points are only the tip, a historical movement or tradition of thought some time in the nineteenth century in which the misleadingness of grammar, and in particular, subject-predicate grammar, was a common subject. Nietzsche, being a trained philologist, would of course be as privy to such a discussion as Russell. A first suggestion of what that discussion might have been and where it might have occurred can be found in Pieter Seuren’s book Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction. In it (secs. 2.6.3, 7.1.3 and elsewhere) Seuren discusses what he calls “the great 19th c. subject-predicate debate” in which the differences between the grammatical, logical, psychological, and semantical structures of a sentence are debated. Grammar is indeed misleading, these people claimed; what is meant, implied, or psychologically suggested by a sentence may be something quite different from what is indicated by the surface grammar.1 However, in Seuren’s book, there is no explicit discussion, as there is in Nietzsche and Russell, of the subject of a sentence misleadingly suggesting that there is some un-sensed substratum in which the qualities of things “inhere.” Further evidence for this suspected tradition of thought is required, but Sullivan takes the first large step in this work of finding Russell’s predecessors in the view that subject-predicate grammar is misleading by pointing out the identity between Russell and Nietzsche on just this point, indicating the existence of a tradition connecting the two. Following Sullivan’s article is one by Sandra Lapointe providing another comparative historical analysis with her article on Frege’s and Husserl’s views on the nature of linguistic signs. This will be of special interest to those curious about Russell’s later views of meaning, after 1920, when he begins looking carefully at the physical properties of language itself, and not just the meaning of these physical marks or utterances. Following these articles are books reviews by Timothy St Vincent on Leonard Steinhorn’s book The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy and Marvin Kohl on Eric Wielenberg’s book God and the Reach of Reason: C.S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell. Concluding the issue is a membership report with data and graph of the ups and downs of the Society’s membership since 1988. And as always, there is a Traveler’s Diary/Conference Report, with the annual treasurer’s report of the Bertrand Russell Society for 2008 included at the end. JO
1 I am grateful to Matt Davidson for pointing this book, and its discussion of the 19th c. subject-predicate debate, out to me. Seuren bases his own account of this debate on pt. 2 of Elffers-van Ketel’s 1991 book The Historiography of Grammatical Concepts
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