The People Involved in the Collected
Papers
A focal point of the office of The Bertrand Russell
Research
Centre is a set of blue,
hard-bound
volumes lined up atop a cabinet in the office on the first floor of
Mills Library
on McMaster’s campus. These seventeen volumes and eight
others at
various stages of
completion, reflect
many years of researchers’ time and sweat, about $3 million
worth
of research funds—and
about
one-half of the planned set of volumes that will eventually make up
The Collected
Papers of
Bertrand Russell.
Russell’s major,
book-length
works,
both
inside and outside the sphere of technical philosophy,
remain in print and are an essential introduction to the man and
his thought. But many of
his
more important or intriguing ideas were published as essays or
journalism, or remained
unpublished in
manuscript form. There is a voluminous body of material in these
categories in the Bertrand
Russell Archives,
which contain
Russell’s complete papers and are one of McMaster
University’s
greatest treasures.
Since Russell was such a provocative thinker on so broad a range of
philosophical, social
and political
questions, and a writer who excelled with the essay form, it is
vital that these shorter
writings be made
accessible in a single, definitive edition that elaborates on his
ideas and concerns and
illustrates the paths by
which he arrived at his conclusions. The Bertrand Russell Editorial
Project at McMaster
University was conceived in order to meet this need.
The project began in 1969 under the auspices of
the University
librarian, William
Ready. After much
planning, but also realizing that a larger editorial team was
needed, the original editors, Dr.
Kenneth
Blackwell and Dr. John G. Slater, professor of philosophy at the
University of Toronto,
invited Dr.
Nicholas Griffin, a McMaster logician and professor of philosophy,
to join
them.
The scope of Russell’s work still required
a
wider range of
academics to edit his humanistic writings. In
1978, ten years after McMaster acquired the Russell Archives,
Professor Alwyn Berland,
Dean of
Humanities and Chair of the project’s Board of Management,
expanded
the team to begin
publication
of the papers. The additional editors were Dr. Richard Rempel of
History and Dr. Andrew
Brink of
English.
Since Russell’s books were in print and
his
letters still in the
process of collection,
the goal was to
publish a complete, reliable, critical, annotated edition of
Russell’s shorter writings and
unpublished
book manuscripts between 1888 and his death in 1970.
The collection would actually comprise two
series. Roughly
one-third of the
volumes would include
Russell’s earlier, so-called technical writings on
philosophy,
logic, science and mathematics.
The
others would reflect Russell’s interests in a large variety
of
other topics—political and
social theory,
war and peace, religion, education, women’s rights and
morality.
Included among the
planned twenty-nine
volumes would be Blackwell’s own bibliography of all of
Russell’s
published texts, on which
he had
been engaged with Harry Ruja since 1964.
The group thus came to include researchers from
McMaster’s
History, Philosophy,
Mathematics and
English departments and Library, and two philosophy professors from
the University of
Toronto. Its
main thrust has been to complete the technical writings (Volumes 2
to 11) while beginning
the
non-technical writings (now Volumes 12 to 31). Two of the original
group are still involved
as
editors.
Armed with a five-year grant from
the Social
Sciences and Humanities
Research
Council (SSHRC) in 1980, the group continued working on Volume 1,
which spanned the
non-technical and technical. It published this volume, Cambridge Essays,
1888–99 in 1983. In each
of the subsequent three years, another book came off the presses,
including Volume 7, Theory of
Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript; Volume 12, Contemplation and Action,
1902–14; and
Volume 8,
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and
Other Essays,
1914–19. Followed by Volume 13,
Prophecy and Dissent,
1914–16
and Volume 14, Pacifism and Revolution,
1916–18 on Russell’s World War I activism to
end
the conflict by a negotiated peace. By the end of 1995, seven more
volumes plus the Bibliography
had joined
the earlier
four. Volumes 10, A Fresh Look at
Empiricism, 1927–
43 and 11, Last Philosophical
Testament,
1943–68 followed in 1996 and 1997;
Volume 15, Uncertain
Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919–22, was
published
in
2000. Volume 28, Man’s Peril, 1954–55,
and
Volume 29, Détente
or
Destruction,
1955–57—both of which
illuminate the genesis
of Russell’s anti-nuclear
protests of the late 1950s and early 1960s—appeared in 2003
and
2005, respectively.
Volume 21, How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma,
1935–38, appeared in 2008. These writings trace
the development of Russell’s pacifist thinking in the
tumultuous years before the Second World War, as well as the
divisions that appeared in the peace movement over how best to
respond to fascist aggression. The philosophical series of the
Collected Papers was completed in January 2014 with the
publication of Volume 5, Toward
“Principia
Mathematica”, 1906–08, edited by Gregory Moore.
Research for seven of the remaining volumes is
ongoing. The editorial work for Volume 16, Labour
and Internationalism, 1922–24, is being done by
Nicholas
Griffin with the assistance of Andrew Bone and Michael D.
Stevenson.
Griffin and Stevenson are also editors of Volume 17,
Authority versus Enlightenment,
1925–27, while Bone is working on Volume 26,
Cold War Fears and Hopes,
1950–52,
and Volume 27, Culture and the Cold
War,
1952–53. Stephen Heathorn is editing Volume 18, Behaviourism and Education,
1927–31, with
William Bruneau, who is also editing educational writings to be
included in
Volumes 18–20. Honorary Russell Archivist, Kenneth Blackwell
is working
on Civilization and the Bomb,
1944–47,
which addresses Russell’s apprehensions in the immediate
post-Second
World War era about the advent of nuclear weapons technology and
the emergence
of the Soviet Union as a superpower. David Blitz of Central
Connecticut State
University and Carl Spadoni, former Director of the William Ready
Division
of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster, are the editors
of
Volume 30, The Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, 1957–59.
Before the Editorial Project was set up in 1980,
about 90
per cent of
Russell’s 2,500 or so
shorter public writings had
never before been collected. About half the volumes in the
Collected Papers have
been published thus far. The edition has received
widespread critical acclaim, proven invaluable as a research tool
and stimulated Russell
scholarship in a
host of areas.