From Prof. Daniel Dennett.

May 11, 2004

To members of the Bertrand Russell Society:

I am deeply honored to receive the Bertrand Russell Society Award for 2004, and truly regretful that I cannot attend your meeting in New Hampshire (one of my favorite states, where I spent many boyhood summers).

Bertrand Russell was one of my heroes, and I even had the opportunity of corresponding with him once. He was the "Patron" of the Voltaire Society, the student philosophical society in Oxford when I was a graduate student in 1963-5, and it fell to the President of the Society to write a letter to Russell each term, informing him on the term's program and inviting him to attend. He never attended, but usually sent back a suitably quotable note. My term as President (Michaelmas Term of 1964) I wrote him the official letter, including the program card for the term (our speakers were Alan Anderson on "Minds and Machines," Richard Hare on Searle on promising, and Peter Geach (with Geoffrey Warnock responding) on "The Perils of Pauline") Russell had just made a big splash in the British press by supporting Mark Lane's book, Rush to Judgment, the first of the books criticizing the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK. I myself was deeply involved in researching the Warren Commission Report, so my letter raised a few points of agreement and disagreement with Russell's views. He responded in a brief message, which I duly read to the assembled members at our next meeting, and then placed in the bulging box of Voltaire Society correspondence that got passed from President to President. On the dissolution of the society that box disappeared for many years, but I found out inadvertently who had it, and asked him if I might have my letter to Russell and his reply for my scrapbook, but he informed me that those letters (and some others I mentioned to him) were no longer in the collection. Alas.

I never met Russell face to face, but saw him often on British telly in those days, and Gilbert Ryle once told me a wonderful story about Russell. When Ryle publicly refused, as Editor of Mind, to review Ernest Gellner's book, Words and Things, which was viciously critical of ordinary language philosophy and Austin's work in particular, there was a great brouhaha in the papers (this was in 1961 or 1962, as I recall, memorably recounted by Ved Mehta in "The Fly and the Fly-Bottle", which was first published in the New Yorker). Ryle told me that in retrospect he realized that he'd made a great mistake, and that it was Russell who had given him the best retrospective advice -- and Russell had written the foreword to Gellner's book!: "When you get such a hateful book, don't publicly refuse to review it, you silly man! Wait a year and then publish a brief, critical review with the author's name misspelled!"

I send you all my thanks for the honor you have bestowed on me, and best wishes,

Daniel Dennett