Man's Peril, 1954-55


Book Description

This volume signals reinvigoration of Russell the public campaigner and captures the essence of Russell's thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War in the mid 1950s.




A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell: Separate publications, 1896-1990


Book Description

Provides for the first time a full, descriptive bibliography of Russell's writings. Textually orientated, it will guide the scholar, collector and the general reader to the authoritative editions of Russell's works.




Détente Or Destruction, 1955-57


Book Description

Détente or Destruction, 1955-57 continues publication of Routledge's multi-volume critical edition of Bertrand Russell's shorter writings. Between September 1955 and November 1957 Russell published some sixty-one articles, reviews, statements, contributions to books and letters to editors, over fifty of which are contained in this volume. The texts, several of them hitherto unpublished, reveal the deepening of Russell's commitment to the anti-nuclear struggle, upon which he embarked in the previous volume of Collected Papers (Man's Peril, 1954-55). Continuing with the theme of nuclear peril, this volume contains discussion of nuclear weapons, world peace, prospects for disarmament and British-Soviet friendship against the backdrop of the Cold War. One of the key papers in this volume is Russell's message to the inaugural conference of the Pugwash movement, which Russell was instrumental in launching and which became an influential, independent forum of East-West scientific cooperation and counsel on issues as an internationally agreed nuclear test-ban. In addition to the issues of war and peace, Russell, now in his eighties, continued to take an interest in a wide variety of themes. Russell not only addresses older controversies over nationalism and empire, religious belief and American civil liberties, he also confronts head-on the new and pressing matters of armed intervention in Hungary and Suez, and of the manufacture and testing of the British hydrogen bomb. This volume includes seven interviews ranging from East-West Relations after the Geneva conference to a Meeting with Russell.




Gilbert Murray Reassessed


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive account of the life and work of the distinguished scholar and public figure Gilbert Murray (1866-1957). Sixteen contributors survey his childhood, his work in the theatre and in international relations, his Greek scholarship and contributions on religion and philosophy, his friendships (including those with Bertrand Russell and A. E. Housman), his long commitment to the Home University Library, his radio work, and his involvement with psychic research. The book opens with memoirs by two of his grandchildren. Two biographies of Murray were published in the 1980s, but the range of his activities makes it impossible for a single person to encompass them all adequately. This book, published 50 years after his death, aims to proved a comprehensive reassessment of a remarkable man.




Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language


Book Description

One of the most prominent philosophers and activists of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell is known not only for his fundamental contributions on the scope of human knowledge and on mathematical logic, but also for his often-controversial views on ethical and linguistic topics. This edited collection of original essays by prominent Russell scholars focuses on the philosopher's positions on the key issues of nuclear war, peace, and language. The contributors critically assess Russell's arguments within their historical and philosophical context and show the significance and topicality that his ideas have retained to the present day, some 80 years since their first articulation. Among the issues examined are Russell's advocacy of preventive war against the Soviets, his activism for peace, his critical assessment of Wittgenstein's analysis of ordinary language, and his account of mathematical statements.




Reconciliation Road


Book Description

Among postwar political leaders, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt played one of the most significant roles in reconciling Germans with other Europeans and in creating the international framework that enabled peaceful reunification in 1990. Based on extensive archival research, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of Brandt’s Ostpolitik from its inception until the end of the Cold War through the lens of reconciliation. Here, Benedikt Schoenborn gives us a Brandt who passionately insisted on a gradual reduction of Cold War hostility and a lasting European peace, while remaining strategically and intellectually adaptable in a way that exemplified the ‘imaginativeness of history’.




Contesting the Moral High Ground


Book Description

How four of Britain's best-known thinkers influenced the public consciousness on issues from God to the environment.




Peace and Power in Cold War Britain


Book Description

Peace and Power in Cold War Britain explores the ban the bomb and anti-Vietnam War movements from the perspective of media history, focusing in particular on the relationship between radicalism and the rise of television. In doing so, it addresses two questions, both of which seem to recur with each major breakthrough in communications technology: what do advances in communications media mean for democratic participation in politics and how do distinctive types of media condition the very nature of that participation itself? In answering these, the book views the ban the bomb and anti-Vietnam War movements in relation to communication power and media discourse. It highlights how these movements intersected with parts of public life that were being transformed by television themselves, shaping struggles for social change among activists and public intellectuals on the streets, in the Labour Party and in the law courts. The significance of this relationship between media and movements was complex and wide-ranging. Christopher R. Hill demonstrates that it contributed to the enrichment of democracy in Cold War Britain, with radicals serving to innovate and pioneer creative forms of political expression from both in and outside of media organisations. However, the movements increasingly succumbed to news coverage and values that revolved around human interest and violence, feeding into the revolutionary spectacle of 1968 and the turn towards identity politics.




The Force of the Virtual


Book Description

Gilles Deleuze once claimed that ‘modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs.’ The Force of the Virtual responds to this need by investigating the consequences of the philosopher’s interest in (and appeal to) ‘the exact sciences.’ In exploring the problematic relationship between the philosophy of Deleuze and science, the original essays gathered here examine how science functions in respect to Deleuze’s concepts of time and space, how science accounts for processes of qualitative change, how science actively participates in the production of subjectivity, and how Deleuze’s thinking engages neuroscience. All of the essays work through Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual—a force of qualitative change that is ontologically primary to the exact, measurable relations that can be found in and among the objects of science. By adopting such a methodology, this collection generates significant new insights, especially regarding the notion of scientific laws, and compels the rethinking of such ideas as reproducibility, the unity of science, and the scientific observer. Contributors: Manola Antonioli, Collège International de Philosophie (Paris); Clark Bailey; Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht U; Manuel DeLanda, U of Pennsylvania; Aden Evens, Dartmouth U; Gregory Flaxman, U of North Carolina; Thomas Kelso; Andrew Murphie, U of New South Wales; Patricia Pisters, U of Amsterdam; Arkady Plotnitsky, Purdue U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Arnaud Villani, Première Supérieure au Lycée Masséna de Nice.




Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age


Book Description

Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander explores the overlooked position of the bystander in the Nuclear Age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. Host to hundreds of American atomic weapons while lacking a nuclear arsenal of its own, Italy's status was an ambiguous one: that of an unwilling—and in many ways passive—accomplice. Inspired by Seamus Heaney's dictum that "there is no such thing as innocent by-standing," the book frames Italy's fraught mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to rethink the role of the sidelined intellectual in the face of mass extinction. Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age includes discrete chapters on the major Italian intellectuals of the time: Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia. Conscious of their own political marginalization, these authors address the atomic question through a wide range of experimental forms, approaching the nearly unthinkable theme in allusive and oblique ways. Often dismissed as disengaged, inconsistent, or merely playful, these works demand instead a political reading capable of recognizing their confrontation with the paradoxes of the nuclear age.