ABSTRACT
In 1925 Bertrand Russell wrote the preface to Friedrich Lange’s The History of Materialism. Lange’s monumental work, which had been published in German sixty years before Russell’s preface, is a grand survey of materialism from the earliest times to the nineteenth century. What Russell says in his preface about materialism-for present purposes, for ‘materialism’ read ‘physicalism’; I will explain the terminology in a moment-is instructive. He writes:
Russell goes on to say that Lange’s book appeared “at the height of the period often described as ‘the materialist ’60s’”—that is, the eighteen-sixties. This period is remarkable from Russell’s point of view because it is a brief period in which materialism became influential. For most of the rest of the
history of philosophy, he thinks, materialism is a minority view. Even Lange, whose book is sympathetic to materialism, is no materialist.
