ABSTRACT
Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy was initially developed in the early 1940s as a series of lectures for the Barnes Foundation, a world-renowned collection of modern French painting, originally established in the Philadelphia suburbs. This chapter focuses on the disjunction between the art-saturated environment of Russell’s lectures and his lack of attention to the topic of aesthetics within them. In so doing, the chapter argues that Russell’s lectures at the Barnes are representative of his unwillingness to recognize his own aesthetic commitments – grounded as they were in ideals of austerity, eternity, and, indeed, abstraction – for what they were. This stubbornness, on Russell’s part, ended up being a great disadvantage as it alienated his audience, who were art students primed to sympathize with his triumphant view of abstraction’s place in scientific knowledge, and obscured the proximity between his own aesthetic beliefs and the history of ideas he was attempting to recount.
