This book examines Bertrand Russells complicated relationships to the women around him, and to feminism more generally. The essays in this volume offer scholarly reassessments of these relationships and their import for the history of feminism and of analytic philosophy.
Russell is a founder of analytic philosophy. He has also been called a feminist due to his public, decades-long advocacy for womens rights and equality of the sexes. But his private behavior towards wives and sexual partners, and his apparently dismissive (occasionally public) responses to some women philosophers, raises the question of what sort of feminist (or chauvinist) Russell actually was.
Focusing on women in Russells circle of acquaintance, including feminist activists and his philosophical interlocutors, this book casts new light on a timeless thinkers feminism and the women who played critical roles in the making of analytic philosophy.
1. Editors Introduction.- 2. A Moral and Intellectual Evaluation of Russells Romantic/Sexual Practices.- 3. Bertrand and Dora Russell on sex, marriage and the rule of fathers.- 4. Sex, Suffrage, and Marriage: Russell and Feminism.- 5. Alice Ambrose and womens work in the foundations debate at the University of Cambridge, 1932-1937.- 6. Alice Ambrose and Margaret MacDonald: Two Women Who Challenged Bertrand Russell on Ordinary Language.- 7. Susan Stebbing and Russells Logical Atomism.- 8. Grandmothers and Founding Mothers of Analytic Philosophy: Constance Jones, Bertrand Russell, and Susan Stebbing on Complete and Incomplete Symbols.- 9. Dorothy Wrinch and the Man of the Century.- 10. I like her very muchshe has very good brains.: Dorothy Wrinchs influence on Bertrand Russell.- l#%