Russell’s ‘History’

To the Editors:

I am grateful to Roger L. Shinn for once again proving the soundness of Routh’s advice that one should always check one’s references. In a footnote to Isaiah Berlin’s “Notes on Prejudice” [NYR, October 18, 2001] I cited Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy in its original 1945 US edition, falsely assuming that the pagination of that edition would be the same as that of the first British edition, published in 1946. Since the pagination varies in other editions too, it is safest to say that the passage in question occurs in the second paragraph of Chapter 23, “Aristotle’s Physics.”

Henry Hardy
Wolfson College, Oxford University
Oxford, England