In the summer of 1900, Bertrand Russell attended an international philosophy conference in Paris and came home convinced he had witnessed a revolution. The Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano had presented a system of logical notation so precise and so powerful that Russell spent the entire voyage back to England in a state of barely contained excitement, learning Peano's symbolism and beginning to grasp what it might make possible. Within weeks, he was working at a pace that alarmed his wife, writing thousands of words a day, barely sleeping, consumed by the conviction that mathematics could be shown to rest entirely on logical foundations. Three years later, he sent Gottlob Frege a letter informing him that the logical system Frege had spent his life constructing contained a fatal contradiction. He spent the next decade with Alfred North Whitehead producing Principia Mathematica, a work of such technical density that it takes several hundred pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. In 1905, in the middle of this colossal project, he paused to write a ten-page paper for the journal Mind that his colleague G. E. Moore would later describe as a paradigm of philosophy. The paper, "On Denoting," changed the way philosophers thought about language, meaning, and reference so completely that its effects are still being worked through today.
British philosopher, logician, and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) made significant contributions to mathematical logic, analytic philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology across a career spanning eight decades and producing a body of work of almost impossible breadth. He wrote extensively on science, education, politics, marriage, and morality, corresponded with Einstein and corresponded against Stalin, was imprisoned for his pacifism during the First World War, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his championing of humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. Yet beneath the public intellectual and the controversialist lay a philosopher of formidable technical power, and it is a single ten-page paper, published quietly in a philosophy journal in 1905, that many consider his most lasting contribution to the discipline.
To explore "On Denoting" and the philosophical debate it ignited requires a guide who understands both its technical machinery and its broader significance. Stephen Neale, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, is one such guide. A leading authority on the philosophy of language and, in particular, on Russell's work, Neale has spent his career examining how language connects to the world, how reference works, and why the questions Russell raised in 1905 remain alive and contested more than a century later.
In the conversation that follows, Neale guides us into the argument of "On Denoting," illuminating both the philosophical problem it solved and the new problems it opened, and reflecting on what the life and work of Bertrand Russell reveal about the relationship between technical philosophy and the largest questions of how we think, speak, and understand the world around us.
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