Footnote DRF.31

DRF.31. Russell was a contributor to The Monist, a philosophy journal... Another early contributor was Ernst Mach. Yet another was Ernst Haeckel, a monist. According to the Stanford Encyclopdia of Philosophy, In late 19th century continental Europe a different notion of ‘direction’ existed than the one that Darwin directly attacked. "Whereas the theory of natural selection maintains that evolution is a directionless process having no guiding factor or end point, relying rather on selection within particular environments on random variations thrown up by the chaos of nature," the scientists Ewald Hering, Ernst Haeckel and Ernst Mach were part of a German tradition which held that there is an inner telos in nature. "Hering and Mach were atheists, and disbelieved in a soul, but still accepted the idea that nature had internal direction."

In Russell's terminology, Hering and Mach were neutral (godless) monists.

The encyclopedia notes that Haeckel, Hering and Mach were leaders of the Monist movement. Russell was a monist during his youthful Hegelian period. On repudiating Hegelianism, he also let go his monism, something he saw as a clever conception of theists. Later in his career he was obliged to accept monism, but tended to avoid that term as he aged -- apparently because of its theological connotations.

During his interwar writing period, Russell contributed to The Monist, as had Haeckel, Hering and Mach before him. According to Stanford,

A look through its early volumes reveals a mixture of scientific applications to the various categories of human existence. Mach was a frequent contributor, and indeed a good friend of the editor, Paul Carus, who also arranged the English translation and publication of many of Mach’s works. In 1906, Monistenbund, a monistic society, was formed with the intention of including everyone who believed that there was only one reality. Haeckel and Ostwald were active members and tried without success to bring in Mach with an offer of the presidency in 1912.

The encyclopedia gives Mach's reply:

There are as many different monisms as there are people in it. Monism is provisionally a goal, after which we all strive, but is scarcely anything fixed or sufficient … It seems to me … ludicrous to found a kind of religious sect, while refusing to consider philosophical questions [as to its nature]. But this is not so terribly important in so far as the movement is limited to a small circle of intellectuals. But if it expands more widely, then it will probably let loose a kind of counterreformation for which I definitely have no sympathy. [Blackmore 1972: 193–4].

According to Wikipedia, The Monist was established in October 1890 by American publisher Edward C. Hegeler.

Initially the journal published papers not only by philosophers but also by prominent scientists and mathematicians such as Ernst Mach, David Hilbert, Henri Poincaré, Pierre Janet, and Ernst Haeckel. The journal helped to professionalize philosophy as an academic discipline in the United States by publishing philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernst Cassirer, John Dewey, Charles Henry Mead, Gottlob Frege, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Sidney Hook, C. I. Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Bertrand Russell. Russell's Philosophy of Logical Atomism was originally published in full as a series of articles in the journal in 1918–19.

After ceasing publication in 1936, the journal resumed publication in 1962 and has been continually published since then.

The journal's editors-in-chief have included Paul Carus (1890–1919), Mary Hegeler Carus (1919–1936), Eugene Freeman (1962–1983), John Hospers (1983–1991), Barry Smith (University at Buffalo, 1992–2016) and Fraser MacBride (University of Manchester, 2017–present). Since January 2015 the journal has been published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hegeler Institute.

Carus also published The Open Court -- a Weekly Journal devoted to the Work of Conciliating Religion and Science.

And The Open Court Publishing Co. is a publisher with offices in Chicago and LaSalle, Ill. It is part of the Carus Publishing Company of Peru, Ill.

Wikipedia:

Open Court was founded in 1887 by Edward C. Hegeler of the Matthiessen-Hegeler Zinc Company, at one time the largest producer of zinc in the United States. Hegeler intended for the firm to serve the purpose of discussing religious and psychological problems on the principle that the scientific world-conception should be applied to religion. Its first managing editor was Carus, Hegeler's son-in-law. For the first 80 years of its existence, the company had its offices in the Hegeler Carus Mansion.

Open Court specializes in philosophy, science, and religion. It was one of the first academic presses in the country, as well as one of the first publishers of inexpensive editions of the classics. It also published the journals Open Court and The Monist; the latter is still being published. The Open Court Monthly Magazine's motto was "Devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and the Extension of the Religious Parliament Idea."

The Open Court journal was founded in February 1887 as the official publication of the Free Religious Association. By the end of 1887, its editor Benjamin F . Underwood resigned and Carus became editor. The Open Court Publishing Co. published The Open Court journal until 1936.

In concert with Northwestern University, Open Court published The Library of Living Philosophers. In the 1950s, Tudor Publishing published the Library. At present, the series is owned by Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

The first volume in the Library appeared in 1939, the brainchild of the late Professor Paul Arthur Schilpp, who, the Library says, "perceived that it would help to eliminate confusions and endless sterile disputes over interpretation if great philosophers could be confronted on a range of questions by their capable philosophical peers and asked to reply to each of them. As well as the critical essays by contributors and the replies to them by the principal figure, each volume would include an intellectual autobiography, a complete bibliography of the great philosopher's works, a photograph, and a handwriting sample."

The Library's volumes are listed as:

John Dewey (1939)
George Santayana (1940)
Alfred North Whitehead (1941)
G. E. Moore (1942)
Bertrand Russell (1944)
Ernst Cassirer (1949)
Albert Einstein (1949)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1952)
Karl Jaspers (1957)
C. D. Broad (1959)
Rudolf Carnap (1963)
Martin Buber (1967)
C. I. Lewis (1968)
Karl Popper (1974)
Brand Blanshard (1980)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1981)
Gabriel Marcel (1984)
W. V. Quine (1986)
Georg Henrik von Wright (1989)
Charles Hartshorne (1991)
A. J. Ayer (1992)
Paul Ricoeur (1995)
Paul Weiss (1995)
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1997)
Roderick Chisholm (1997)
P. F. Strawson (1998)
Donald Davidson (1999)
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2000)
Marjorie Grene (2002)
Jaakko Hintikka (2006)
Michael Dummett (2007)
Richard Rorty (2010)
Arthur Danto (2013)
Hilary Putnam (2015)
Umberto Eco (2017)
Julia Kristeva (2020)