Bernard Linsky, BA, PhD

About

AB (Philosophy) University of Chicago, 1971

PhD(Philosophy) Stanford University, 1975

University of Alberta: Assistant Professor 1976-1982, Associate Professor 1982-1997, Full Professor 1997

President, Society for Exact Philosophy, 1998-2000

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, 2014

Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, 1997-2003

Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Arts, U of A, 2005-2008

Retired as Professor Emeritus, July 1, 2018

Research

My current research project is to edit lecture notes that students took in Bertrand Russell's university lectures at Cambridge and Harvard between 1910 and 1914. (Russell was dismissed from Cambridge in 1916 because of his opposition to WWI, and so this is the only sustained series of lectures as a regular academic appointment.) Students and auditors in the lectures include Henry M. Sheffer, G. E. Moore, Victor Lenzen, Harry T. Costello, and T. S. Eliot (who was a graduate student in Philosophy at Harvard in 1914). Some of these notes were well known, but have never been studied before, and some were only located as part of this project. I am working with James Levine of Trinity College, Dublin, on this project.

Related research has led me to the work of the Polish philosopher Leon Chwistek who wrote on Russell and engaged in a dispute with his colleague Roman Ingarden in the period between the World Wars.

In 1920 to 1921 Bertrand Russell lived in China and delivered several series of lectures at Peking University. Those lectures were delivered in English and interpreted by Zhao Yuanren, the distinguished Chinese linguist. Zhao's words were recorded and published in several periodicals and are still in print, but have never been back translated into English. My project is to find translators for these lectures to provide a better understanding of Russell's views during that year.

Teaching

As a professor Emeritus, I no longer teach in the Department, however I am available to meet with students by appointment.