A History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII: Bentham to Russell

Summary

Bentham to Russell (1966) is the eighth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy. Having followed German thought from Fichte to Nietzsche in Volume VII, Copleston crosses the Channel and the Atlantic to trace British and American philosophy from the reforming utilitarians of the early nineteenth century to the analytic turn associated with G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. The book thus covers roughly a century in which English-speaking philosophy changed its allegiance three times. The first stage is empiricist and reforming. Jeremy Bentham's principle of utility, his calculus of pleasures and pains and his program of legal reform are set beside James Mill's associationist psychology. John Stuart Mill then receives extended treatment: his inductive logic and the methods of experimental inquiry in A System of Logic, his attempt to make utilitarianism humane by distinguishing higher and lower pleasures, and his defence of individual liberty. Copleston follows the empiricist line into the agnostics and positivists of the later century and into Herbert Spencer's ambitious evolutionary synthesis, with its doctrine of an Unknowable behind phenomena. The second stage is idealist. Copleston describes how German idealism, mediated by literary figures and by scholars such as J. H. Stirling and T. H. Green, gave British universities a new metaphysics and a new ethics of self-realization in the common good. F. H. Bradley's dialectic of appearance and reality and Bernard Bosanquet's absolute receive careful exposition, followed by the reaction of the personal idealists who wished to preserve the reality of finite selves. A shorter section on America centres on Josiah Royce's absolute idealism and his philosophy of loyalty. The third stage is pragmatist and American. Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of inquiry and his rule for clarifying the meaning of concepts by their conceivable practical effects, William James's broader pragmatism and his defence of the right to believe, F. C. S. Schiller's humanism and John Dewey's instrumentalism and philosophy of education are distinguished with care rather than lumped together. The last stage is the revolt against idealism: British and American realism, Moore's defence of common sense and his method of analysis, and three chapters on Russell's mathematical logic, his theory of descriptions and logical atomism, his changing theories of knowledge and his views on ethics and religion. An epilogue reflects on what the century had achieved, and an appendix treats John Henry Newman's account of belief, assent and the illative sense. Copleston had debated Russell on the existence of God over BBC radio in 1948, which makes the patience of the Russell chapters notable. Throughout he keeps his own estimates apart from the exposition, though as a Catholic philosopher he often presses the question of what each school can say about God, conscience and the moral law. The volume remains in copyright; this record describes it and links to editions for purchase.

Top Lessons

• Counting pleasures and weighing persons

  Copleston sets out Bentham's hope of reforming law by calculating pleasures and pains, and Mill's attempt to rescue the theory by ranking pleasures in quality. The chapters let students see both the moral seriousness of the reformers and the difficulty of deriving duty, justice and the dignity of the single person from the sum of happiness.

• The absolute and the finite self

  British idealism began partly as a moral protest against what Green and Bradley saw as the thin individualism of the utilitarians, offering an ethics of self-realization within a social whole. Yet Copleston shows that the absolute of Bradley and Bosanquet threatened to swallow the very persons it was meant to ennoble, which is why the personal idealists rebelled. Students can trace how a corrective can overshoot.

• Truth, usefulness and belief

  Copleston carefully separates Peirce's rule for clarifying meaning from James's broader claim that true ideas are those that work, and from Dewey's instrumentalism. The distinction teaches students that a method for testing ideas is not the same as a definition of truth, and it frames James's argument that in some live, momentous choices we may believe before evidence compels us.

• Answering an opponent you have debated

  Copleston and Russell argued about God on the BBC in 1948, yet the Russell chapters expound his logic, theory of knowledge and ethics at length and with evident respect before offering criticism. The book models how a Christian can give an adversary a full hearing without conceding the argument.

• How ordinary people reach certainty

  The appendix on Newman closes the volume with a different kind of empiricism, attentive to how real people arrive at certainty through converging probabilities judged by the illative sense. Copleston presents it as a serious alternative to both Mill's logic and the idealist absolute, and as a philosophical account of religious belief that does not depend on demonstration alone.

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Medical Lens

The volume touches the history of psychology at several points: the associationist psychology of James Mill and his successors, Spencer's evolutionary account of mind, and William James, who trained in medicine and wrote The Principles of Psychology (1890) before turning chiefly to philosophy. Copleston treats these as philosophy of mind rather than as medicine, so the book is useful mainly as context for readers of James or Mill. Any discussion of Mill's well-known mental crisis should be drawn from Mill's Autobiography, not attributed to this volume without checking.

• Chapters on the utilitarian movement, James Mill section

  Exposition of James Mill's associationist psychology, in which complex mental states are built from associated sensations and ideas, an important stage in the history of empirical psychology.

• Chapter on William James and F. C. S. Schiller

  Account of James's radical empiricism and his view of consciousness as a stream of experience rather than an entity, background to his psychology and to his writings on religious experience.

• Appendix on John Henry Newman

  Newman's analysis of how the mind moves from probabilities to certitude, relevant to the psychology of belief and conviction.