Submitted by Alexander Klein, Dec 2, 2007 19:36

I must correct a misstatement in this article. Professor Hart writes:

"Mr. Johnson gives briefly some of the pertinent biographical facts about Wittgenstein (1889–1951), but omits the salient fact that Wittgenstein was an advanced student — colleague really — of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. At the time Russell was the world's foremost logician. With Whitehead he had written "Principia Mathematica" (1910). But Wittgenstein proved to be so much his superior as a logician that he put Russell out of the logic business. Thereafter Russell wrote only popular works — an enterprise for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize in literature."

The claim that Russell wrote "only popular works" after 1913 (when the third and final volume of *Principia Mathematica* appeared--in 1910 only the first volume had been published) is not correct. While Russell spent his entire career writing popular essays, he also continued to write technical philosophy, at least through the 1940s. Some landmark philosophical works after 1913 include *Our Knowledge of the External World: As a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy* (1914), *Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy* (1919), *The Analysis of Mind* (1921), *The Analysis of Matter* (1927), and *An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth* (1940), to name only a few.

Wittgenstein deeply influenced Russell, it is true. But the suggestion that Wittgenstein somehow forced Russell into retirement from technical philosophy is specious.

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