Eric wonders about St Stephen's College, philosophy, and the remnants of British imperialism in 1960s India.
St Stephen's was the College of the Cambridge Mission, an Anglican college in Delhi University. It's main court was called Andrews Court, after C. F. Andrews, the "Charlie" of Richard Attenborough's film of Gandhi. Those who remember that film will know that Andrews was an important figure in the Indian independence movement, and a close friend of Gandhi, who nonetheless felt compelled to send him back to St Stephen's because it did no good to have an Englishman be a main advisor to the Indian National Congress. Like its academic rival, Hindu College, across the road, St Stephen's aimed to educate Indians who would govern India. In many ways, it was a vestige of English culture, but in no way did it represent a phase of British imperialism.
So why did Gupta make me read Bradley? I can't really say. Perhaps he was being sadistic. More likely, he thought that the early parts of AR were good examples of philosophical dialectic, which would capture my interest. More importantly, these Cambridge-influenced people obviously did not regard Bradley as a philosophical corpse. I doubt that the rhetoric against him was taken as seriously at the time as Candlish makes out in his book. (Certainly, Johnson treats Bradley's topics with cool analytic polish, and without much hint of his having become a non-person.)
Why was I attracted to Russell? It had more to do with mathematics than physics, and with my lumbering solo attempts to read "On Denoting" and "Knowledge by Acquaintance." And initially, at least, more to do with love than mathematics. My girl-friend of the time was a mathematician and we enjoyed reading works like Newman's World of Mathematics together. Russell's Autobiography appeared around that time—my copy is inscribed from her—as did Hardy's Russell and Trinity. Russell was a very romantic figure for me as I moved into philosophy.
That's my answer to Eric's question. I should say it sounded a tad patronizing to me—it's strange to me to hear that my education was an expression of "the "moral and spiritual mission" of "British imperialism's late phase." But I choose to treat the query respectfully. My being asked to read Bradley may have been something other than a vestige of Victorian England.
Coming back to Candlish, my remark that he is a professional historian was meant ironically. Eric rightly says the book is moralizing in tone; I said it is angry. His remark about Cambridge and spies is surely anger. And it is at best wishful thinking to defend Bradley where Bradley can't be defended—my example was the treatment of the copula. This is not to say that he is wrong about everything. No doubt the claim that Bradley was "unanswerably" correct about relations deserves close examination. On the face of it, though, Candlish is anachronistic about Bradley's theory of relations, which he subsumes under Frege's theory of concepts. His idea is that Russell would have saved a lot of time adopting Bradley's theory of relations instead of coming to it by a circuitous route through Wittgenstein.
I won't go into this, because the issue is well discussed in James Levine's NDPR review of Candlish. But Russell, it seems, was fussed by Frege's problem regarding "the concept horse", a problem that was not posed in that way by Bradley. Let me end with a quote from Levine:
For Russell, although the phrase "there are" is "systematically ambiguous" in "There are relations" and "There are particulars", that "There are relations" can be interpreted as being true is enough to undermine Bradley's view that "relations are unreal". Hence, for Russell, as against what Candlish claims, by rejecting his "multiple-relation" theory of judgment and following Wittgenstein in holding that relational expressions do not serve as designating expressions or names, he has not thereby accepted the "unreality of relations".
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