As we have noted, Russell is central to the advertisement of early analytic philosophy; his “On Denoting” and Our Knowledge of the External World are shop windows in which the new methods are publicly put through their paces. He was also willing to enter into contention with philosophers from other schools in a way that Frege, Moore or Wittgenstein were not, and especially to attack philosophies that he himself had abandoned (such as Hegelianism and Meinongian realism). Perhaps inevitably, he thereby also played a highly significant role in “othering” much of the contemporaneous philosophical work being done in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Indeed, despite his own merits as a philosopher, Russell can be a problematic reader of other philosophers, perhaps especially early continental philosophers (Hegel, Nietzsche, etc.), although he has almost nothing to say about Husserl and Heidegger throughout his career.

The Russell–Bergson encounters have been considerably less discussed in the recent literature than either the Frege–Husserl or the Carnap–Heidegger encounters, despite being perhaps equally significant in the development of the divide; both Russell and Bergson were at the time of the debate well-known public intellectuals, unlike Frege, Husserl, Carnap and Heidegger (at the time of their relevant debates). For a period, from around 1903 until after the First World War, Russell was indeed arguably the most famous philosopher in the world; Bergson's most well-known work, Creative Evolution (1907), very rapidly brought him a public fame that increased with the publication in 1911 of an English translation that saw him feted on a visit to England that year (Monk 1996: 232–3). This encounter begins with that work.