Russelliana: “Bertrand Russell’s Representationalism about Consciousness: Reconsidering His Relationship to William James” (Panel Discussion)

Topic: Online panel and discussion of paper on Russell and James

Time: Oct 21, 2023 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

The next  “Russelliana” will be a presentation and panel discussion of the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and William James. It will take place on 21 Oct. 2023 at 1:00 PM EST, co-hosted by the Bertrand Russell Society and Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster University, with guest participation by members of the William James Society. To receive the Zoom link, register here.

The discussion will be focused on a newly published paper by Alex Klein, “Russell’s Representationalism about Consciousness: Reconsidering His Relationship to James”, which appears in the latest issue of Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies. Dr. Klein, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre, will be joined on a panel by Steven Levine (Philosophy, University of Massachusetts) and Donovan Wishon (Philosophy, University of Mississippi). The format will allow for an extended period of open discussion as well.

Although Dr. Klein will not be “presenting” his paper, there is an abstract below. The paper is also available digitally on Project Muse here. (For those without institutional access to this resource, the editors of the journal have requested that the article be “unlocked” for the purposes of this session).

ABSTRACT: “Russell’s Representationalism about Consciousness: Reconsidering His Relationship to James”

While Russell famously rejected the pragmatist theory of truth, recent scholarship portrays his post-prison accounts of belief and knowledge as resembling James’s. But deeper divisions in fact persisted between Russell and James concerning the nature of mind. I argue 1) that Russell’s neutral monist approach to consciousness in The Analysis of Mind constitutes an early form of representationalism in that he took states to be phenomenally conscious partly in virtue of (truly) representing an antecedent (typically just-passed) sensation; 2) that although James also saw representation (typically of expected kinaesthetic sensation) as a crucial component of consciousness, he contended that representation is a matter of affording future-directed action controlthat aligns with the agent’s interests; and 3) that what divides these contrasting approaches to consciousness and representation is precisely what Russell would continue to reject in the pragmatist theory of truth, namely the productive role James assigned to an agent’s interests.