Robert Edmund Tully

The essays in this volume on the subject of equality are the work of scholars at Bard College and West Point. Their research falls within the areas of history, religion, legal theory, social science, ethics and philosophy. The regions covered include the Middle and Far East, Europe, and America; the time periods studied are both contemporary and historical. Each essay is a well-detailed exploration which assumes the reader has no prior acquaintance with the topic. Together, the studies reveal both conflicting standards of equality as well as patterns of pernicious inequality. In an ideal world, equality and inequality among humans would vary in acceptable proportion, increase of the one ensuring decrease of the other. Unfortunately, as the studies illustrate, any such expectation of progress in the real world is almost routinely thwarted. Despite the wide variety of topics, a common thread binds these essays. Human nature seems to harbor a moral deficiency lying deeper than any written laws and those traditional customs which promote inequality and breed injustice. The fault is prominent in those who champion unjust laws or who willingly enforce discrimination but it is no less active in the silent many who condone the practice. The essays reveal the same persistent and unappealing trait which social groups from the remote past to the present manifest in various ways: blind determination to perpetuate whatever advantages one group believes it enjoys over another, convinced that its own members are more equal than theirs. Being made unequal, the others too easily become targets who are considered less worthy, sometimes even less human.

While Wittgenstein’s Tractatus keeps issues of metaphysics and ontology at arm’s length, the world it presents seems altogether monistic in character. In Wittgenstein’s account, it is a world of objects and facts, a world which lacks selves, values, cognitive relations, and God. I argue that the Tractarian world is nevertheless dualistic. I defend the view that the Tractatus points away from monism towards dualism and that Wittgenstein’s concepts of thought, sense, and understanding are an essential part of its structure. The language Wittgenstein uses was necessitated by his project of giving a sharp account of the nature of description. It is thus ironic that Wittgenstein defends dualism in the Tractatus and does so in the only form in which he thought it could be defended. Along the way, I try to show that his treatment of thought, sense, and understanding is both a continuation and correction of treatments which Frege and Russell had previously given to these concepts.

Aristotle accurately characterized humans as political animals. Whether through birth or from choice, people naturally cluster into groups for protection, advancement, and the pursuit of well-being. But Aristotle’s description does not hint at the powerful binary tension within this human tendency. Leaders enhance a social group’s sense of identity by appealing to the members’ commitments and shared traditions, to their hopes, strengths, sacrifices, and fears. Often, however, they cultivate not only an awareness of difference but even a sense of superiority, since for every social group there are those outsider, the “them”. Maintaining a group’s solidarity can too easily lead to the righteousness of intolerance towards those who are excluded. The reinforcement of group-identity in this way runs so deep in human nature that holding up a mirror to ourselves inevitably reveals a split image: the people we want to see and the people we’re glad we’re not. Intolerance: Political Animals and Their Prey presents stark examples of how the “us” have treated the “them”. The papers in this volume hold up various unflattering mirrors of intolerance from the areas of History, Law, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion. The authors of these scholarly studies do not condemn. Rather, their research compels us to look at ourselves as the political animals we are. Intolerance: Political Animals and Their Prey is the product of a year-long multi-disciplinary collaboration between faculty members of Bard College and the United States Military Academy at West Point. The project involved parallel seminar courses at both institutions along with Joint Sessions, all focused on the central theme of intolerance, and culminated in a three-day academic Conference at Bard in the Spring of 2015. This volume inaugurates a new series being published by Hamilton Books under the general title, Dialogues on Social Issues: Bard College and West Point.

The general editorial plan behind The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell calls for two parallel series, one concerned with Russell's work on philosophy, logic and mathematics, the other with his less technical contributions in areas such as politics, practical ethics, history and education. Volume 1, sub-titled Cambridge Essays, 1888–99, is in a sense the ancestral volume of both series, for it comprises both technical and non-technical subjects. Russell appears here as diarist, public speaker, political commentator, as well as apprentice philosopher and expert on non-Euclidian geometries. The Collected Papers as a whole will span the more than 80 years of Russell's writings devoted to a formidable range of topics from the personal to the highly abstract but, large as it is, this publishing project will make no attempt to bring together the totality of his writings, since many of these remain in print and are readily available. Instead, the project's distinct emphasis will be on Russell's shorter writings, such as essays, articles, reviews and speeches, which are not so easily located, even when previously published. Grouped together in convenient subdivisions, these papers will chronicle for us Russell's intellectual and social growth to an extent even greater than that attempted by Russell himself in his three-volume Autobiography or in My Philosophical Development, and they will also serve to acquaint us with the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of the venerable figure behind the well-known major books. The project's essential aim, then, is to mine and refine the vast Russell Archives in a way that will yield a permanent foundation of study for anyone, whether mere admirer or life-long scholar, who has any interest in Russell's life and work.