Continuity and Change in the Development of Russells Philosophy

The general view of Russells work amongst philosophers has been that repeat- edly, during his long and distinguished career, crucial changes of mind on fun- damental points were significant enough to cause him to successively adopt a diversity of radically new philosophical positions. Thus Russell is seen to have embraced and then abandoned, amongst others, neo-Hegelianism, Platonic re- alism, phenomenalism and logical atomism, before settling finally on a form of neutral monism that philosophers have generally found to be incredible. This view of Russell is captured in C. D. Broads famous remark that "Mr. Russell pro- duces a different system of philosophy every few years . . . " (Muirhead, 1924: 79). Reflecting this picture of Russell continually changing his position, books and papers on Russells philosophy have typically belonged to one of two kinds. Either they have concentrated on particular periods of his thought that are taken to be especially significant, or, accepting the view of his successive conversion to dis- tinctly different philosophical positions, they have provided some account of each of these supposedly disconnected periods of his thought. While much good work has been done on Russells philosophy, this framework has had its limitations, the main one being that it conceals the basic continuity behind his thought.