Book Description

The field of mathematics may be approached from either of two opposite directions. The more familiar direction is constructive, towards gradually increasing complexity. The other direction is less familiar, and it proceeds through analysis to greater abstractness and logical simplicity. In the latter case, we ask what more general ideas and principles can be found in terms of which our starting point can be defined and deduced. The pursuit of this opposite direction characterizes mathematical philosophy rather than ordinary mathematics.

Bertrand Russell is the most important philosopher of mathematics of the twentieth century. The author of The Principles of Mathematics, and, with Alfred Whitehead, the massive Principia Mathematica, Russell brought together his formidable knowledge of the subject and his skills as a gifted communicator to provide a classic introduction to the philosophy of mathematics.

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy sets out in a lucid and non-technical way the main ideas of Principia Mathematica. It is as inspiring and useful to the beginner as it was when it was first published in 1919. This paperback edition of Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy includes an introduction by John G. Slater of the University of Toronto.

Customer Reviews (8)

A Joyful, Friendly Introduction to Bertrand Russell
Okay, I have to be honest- I was a little intrepid picking up this book, and it had nothing to do with Russell's math.I had this really dogmatic atheist friend who used to endlessly quote "Why I am not a Christian," and it put me off of Bertrand Russell.

This book is a joy.It's easy to read, interesting to think about, and inexpensive.Three virtues of math books that are hard to find in combination!

A Philosophy Reading Classic
A great book by a great philosopher. Of course, much of the material was for its time advanced and revolutionary now it is more of a classic introductory text given a basic preparation in critical reading and basic mathematics to sufficiently appreciate the nuance of his thought.

Good introduction To Mathematical Logic
Bertand Russell's "Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy" provides the reader with a great understanding of mathematical philosophy in a very simple and straightforward manner. Though this is an introductory work it may not be casual reading to all who endeavor to read it. Beginning with definition of numbers and sets it expands to provide definitions of simple and complex and builds to provide a good understanding of the logic behind mathematics.While much of what is spoken about may seem very elementary the logic behind certainly is not. While the book is not nearly as expansive ad "Principia Mathematica" it is a good distillation of the bigger work and provides a great introduction to anyone wishing to explore that work. I recommend this book to anyone interested in formal logic and believe that it should be in the required reading for any formal logic introductory class.Further anyone interested in reading Goedel's work's which expand on Russell's work needs at least to read this work prior to Goedel.I find this book to be very succinct and readable and ultimately very worthy of the effort it takes to read.

-- Ted Murena

Substantial effort required.Careful reading necessary.
Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead created the monumental work Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), the ambitious and comprehensive effort to provide a detailed reduction of the whole of mathematics to logic. In 1919 Russell was jailed for antiwar protests and while in prison he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, a seminal work in the field for more than 70 years.

I have devoted substantial time and effort to this 200 page book. Unless you are a student of logic, this book may not be for you. I suggest alternatives below.

I stayed the course and worked my way through each chapter, sometimes backing up, and often repeating several chapters before advancing again. Bertrand Russell is admired for his eloquence and style. Nonetheless, I can assure you that a methodical reading will require much effort.

I was forewarned. At one point a friend and colleague, a previous professor of mathematics at Texas A&M, expressed surprise that I was tackling this particular book. He considered Russell's work to be dated and not particularly easy going. I continued plodding along.

Russell begins with familiar ground, Peano's effort to derive the entire theory of natural numbers from five premises and three undefined terms (primitives). Russell demonstrates why Peano's approach fails to serve as an adequate basis for arithmetic.

In chapter 2 Russell introduces the work of Frege, who first succeeded in logicising arithmetic. We are led to a definition of number: the number of a class is the class of all those classes that are similar to it, or more simply, a number is anything which is the number of some class.

The third chapter introduces properties termed hereditary, posterity, and inductive. After some effort, we define the natural numbers as those to which proofs by mathematical induction can be applied. We also learn that mathematical induction is not valid for infinite numbers.

Russell now addresses the serial character of natural numbers, a characteristic involving finding or construction of an asymmetrical transitive connected relation.

In Chapters 5 and 6 Russell distinguished between cardinal numbers (the earlier definition of number) and relation numbers (also called ordinal numbers). I had difficulty with the interplay between the relations aliorelative, transitive, asymmetrical, square, and connected. For example, an asymmetrical relation is the same thing as a relation whose square is an aliorelative.

In chapter 7 I was initially surprised by Russell's assertion that the common belief that the complex numbers include the real numbers, the real numbers include the rational numbers, and the rational numbers include the natural numbers is erroneous and must be discarded.

The next thee chapters - infinite cardinal numbers, infinite series and ordinals, and limits and continuity -were more difficult. Eight more chapters follow.

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy is philosophy, logic, and mathematics. It investigates the logical foundations of mathematics. It requires very careful reading.

I can suggest alternatives. Howard Eves in his delightful Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics offers an excellent chapter titled Logic and Philosophy that compares three approaches - Logicism (Russell and Whitehead), Intuitionism (Brouwer and Heyting), and Formalism (Hilbert's Grundlagen der Geometrie). He also provides in an appendix a short overview of Godel's theorems (1931) which demonstrated that no complete or consistent axiomatic development of mathematics is attainable.

I also highly recommend Godel's Proof, a short book by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman. Godel's Proof demonstrates that Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica must necessarily be incomplete and inconsistent.

As all Russell's writings, a masterwork.
A magnificent, fantastic and very readable introduction to the highly abstract world of formal logic and the foundations of mathematics. Lord Russell is not only one of the greatest logicians of all time, but he is also an astonishing writer, blessed with an elegant, heavenly precise concision of style and sharpness of argumentation. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume signals reinvigoration of Russell the public campaigner. The title of the volume is taken from one of his most famous and eloquent short essays and probably the best known of his many broadcasts for the BBC. Man's Peril 1954-55 not only captures the essence of Russell's thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War in the mid 1950s, but its extraordinary impact which served to jolt him into political protest once again. The activism of which we glimpse the initial stirrings in this volume continued in various guises more or less without interruption until his death. Russell later became involved with pressure group politics of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the civil disobedience tactics of the Committee of 00. In the writings assembled in this volume, however, he is looking towards the non-aligned states and world scientific opinion as possible brokers of détente. Although Russell was becoming increasingly immersed in work for peace, this was not to find him reminiscing about his peace about peace campaigning during the First World War, defending "History As an Art", and attacking the obscurantism of obscenity legislation and the opponents of birth control. ... Read more

Book Description
BERTRAND RUSSELL UNPOPULAR ESSAYS SIMON AND SCHUSTER NEW YORK PREFACE MOST of the following essays, which were written at various times during the last fifteen years, are concerned to combat, in one way or another, the growth of dogmatism, whether of the Right or of the Left, which has hitherto characterized our tragic century. This serious purpose inspires them even if, at times, they seem flippant, for those who are solemn and pontifical are not to be successfully fought by being even more solemn and even more pontifical A word as to the title. In the Preface to my Human Knowl edge I said that I was writing not only for professional philoso phers, and that philosophy proper deals with matters of interest to the general educated public. Reviewers took me to task, saying they found parts of the book difficult, and im plying that my words were such as to mislead purchasers. I do not wish to expose myself again to this charge I will therefore confess that there are several sentences in the present volume which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a litde puzzling. On this ground I do not claim that the essays are popular and if not popular, then unpopular. BERTRANB RUSSELL April, 1950 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Three of the essays included in this volume Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, Ideas That Have Helped Mankind, and Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind were originally published by Mr. K Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kansas, with whose permission they are now reprinted. B, R. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Preface v I. Philosophy and Politics i II. Philosophy for Laymen i III The Future of Mankind 34 IV. Philosophys Ulterior Motives 45 V. The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed 58 VI. On Being Modern-minded 65 VII An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish 71 VIIL The Functions of a Teacher 112 IX, Ideas That Have Helped Mankind 124 X. Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind 146 XL Eminent Men I Have Known 166 XII. Obituary 173 UNPOPULAR ESSAYS Philosophy and Politics THE British are distinguished among the nations of mod ern Europe, on the one hand by the excellence of their philosophers, and on the other hand by their contempt for philosophy. In both respects they show their wisdom. But contempt for philosophy, if developed to the point at which it becomes systematic, is itself a philosophy it is the philosophy which, in America, is called instrumentalism. I shall suggest that philosophy, if it is bad philosophy, may be dangerous, and therefore deserves that degree of negative respect which we accord to lightning and tigers. What positive respect may be due to good philosophy I will leave for the moment an open question. The connection of philosophy with politics, which is the subject of my lecture, has been less evident in Britain than in Continental countries. Empiricism, broadly speaking, is con nected with liberalism, but Hume was a Tory what philoso phers call idealism has, in general, a similar connection with conservatism, but T. H. Green was a Liberal. On the Continent distinctions have been more clear cut, and there has been a greater readiness to accept or reject a block of doctrines as a whole, without critical scrutiny of each separate part. In most civilized countries at most times, philosophy has 2 UNPOPULAR ESSAYS been a matter in which the authorities had an official opinion, and except where liberal democracy prevails this is still the case. The Catholic Church is connected to the philosophy of Aquinas, the Soviet government to that of Marx. The Nazis upheld German idealism, though the degree of allegiance to be given to Kant, Fichte, or Hegel respectively was not clearly laid down. Catholics, Communists, and Nazis all consider that their views on practical politics are bound up with their views on theoretical philosophy. Democratic liberalism, in its early successes, was connected with the empirical philosophy de veloped by Locke... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

POPULIST ESSAYS
Russell was not really an iconoclast, much less a rebel, least of all any revolutionary. His speciality was stating the obvious when orthodoxy did not want it stated, and pointing out what ought to have been obvious when lumpen conventional opinion could not be bothered looking for it. He also made statements and advanced arguments at times that were just plumb wrong or at least implausible, which makes him like any of the rest of us; but for the most part when he advanced opinions that went against the grain he didn't do it simply to annoy because he knew it teased, it usually meant that there was something wrong with the grain. He wasn't really a preacher either, in the sense that he had no great message of his own. His mind was basically analytical, and what drove him was a wish to counter what he saw as error, often dangerous error. He had a strong theoretical bent as everyone knows, but what marks him out among the generality of philosophers is his strong desire to communicate with not just students and other specialists but with the world at large.

This collection was published in 1950, and its contents date from the 15 years leading up to that time. They include his tongue-in-cheek self-obituary which he thought would be printed in his 91st year, although in the end he lived to age 97, finally falling victim to influenza; but what they are mainly concerned with is politics and philosophy. One of the political pieces is The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, making the perfectly sensible point that the oppressed have no superior virtue. The reason why we should support the oppressed, it seems obvious to me, is simply that they are oppressed and not that they possess some sainthood bestowed on them by the sentimental. Otherwise his chief political preoccupation is with nuclear weapons, of which he was a celebrated opponent just as I myself am an obscure one. Russell sees the solution to the problem as being world government, and I suppose it's fair to say that this scion of the English aristocracy has next to no sense of Realpolitik. On the other hand I would say that he has put his finger on what I would see as the reality of the issue to this extent - once we have unlocked the atom we are playing with the power of Creation itself, as Jimmy Carter once said. It is something that is bigger than any nation, bigger than the entire planet, bigger than the entire galaxy. To make it an instrument of national policy is something that can be controlled at national level only for so long, and if we are to keep it under control internationally the individual nations, however important they think it makes them, are going to have to relinquish their private grip on it. Russell could not bring about rationality in the perception of the issue, still less can I expect to, but sooner or later, for better reasons or for worse, we are all going to have to.

When it comes to the philosophical side, Russell characteristically starts with a piece entitled Philosophy for Laymen, and in this and some later chapters he provides a handy little guide to which of them said what. His fearless common sense is at its self-confident best in some of this, as in his withering contempt for Plato's monstrous Republic. It has long seemed to me that abstract reasoning has a capacity for unsettling people's world-view in a completely unnecessary way. At the risk of seeming philistine, I am more than glad of his authoritative support for my own view that a great deal of the grander type of philosophy is plain old rubbish, the problem being to articulate why this is so. At the time of these essays, the linguistic school of epistemology mainly associated with Oxford does not seem to have gained the ascendancy that it would soon do. There has been a reaction against it on perceived grounds (often perceived rightly) of trivialisation of the philosophical process, but I maintain that it performed a major service. Russell's own way of attacking some of his great predecessors is slightly ad hominem, detecting psychological and biographical reasons for their way of thinking, and he seems to have resented the approach of the elegant master of all the linguistic philosophers J L Austin. However even without help from Oxford it seems to me that Russell could have demolished the systematic scepticism of Descartes simply by saying that if we are to carry doubt to these lengths we might as well doubt that we are doubting while we are about it. Again I would have thought that he had various simple replies to Bishop Berkeley's famous proposition that we only have an `idea' of (say) a tree. One would be that when we stop looking at the tree all that we remove is this `idea' and it all proves nothing about the independent reality of the tree. Another would be that if a man were killed by a falling tree because he didn't see it falling his misfortune was not that he had an idea of the tree but that he had no idea of it. When it comes to confronting a genuine giant like Hume, Russell could have done with the linguistic method. If I may make so bold, my answer to Hume's finding that `cause' cannot be identified might be `Who said it could?' It`s not something that can be abstracted from individual propositions of the kind `A is caused by X' any more than `reality' can be so extracted from propositions to the effect `A is real', as Austin so brilliantly demonstrated.

The attacks on entrenched opinions seem rather old hat these days, at least to the irreligious like myself. However they stay entrenched in some quarters, and the wit and gusto of Russell's ridicule should therefore stay entrenched too. All good intellectual smelling-salts.

The method -Clarity short of totalcomprehensiveness
There is something wonderfully light and quick about these essays. Russell is not afraid of 'sacred cows' and he takes apart in this way philosophical greats Plato, Aristotle , Hegel, and comprehensive all - encompassing programs for understanding and shaping reality.
He defends a kind of 'enlightened liberalism' an openness to the market of ideas, a sense that truth is not the sole possession of any single vision or system.
His natural bent and lifework move him to feel close to 'observational methods' to ascientific way of understanding the world. It is interesting that though Russell is generally identified as a radical leftist he takes apart the Marxian historical straightjacket, as well as the Hegelian one.
Russell writes so clearly and cleverly , seems to provide such ready and reasonable answers to any questions he raises that it is only through more reflective rereading that one begins to see, his prejudices also.
Our scientific, and technological universe has changed so dramatically in the years since this work was written that it would of course be instructive to know what Russell would think about ' Internet' and ' stem cell research' and a kind of ' post- modernism' which is one possible path that might come out of his own pluralism and liberalism.
It is interesting that in the small chapters towards the end where he writes about those he admires, the one philosopher who wins his praise as person is Pragmatism's, Truth- as - cash - value of our investigations' William James.
Russell often offends but also hits the mark palpably many times.
This work is a pleasure to read, but not for the answers it provides but for its open- minded way of questioning.a

Lifetime Book
I read this book 40 years ago, and it still sticks with me.
Russell is a stuffy upper class Englishman, and has so much
fun with it.

"A dog, a wife, and a walnut tree,
The more you beat them the better they be."

I have no experience of the moral effect of flagellation on walnut trees, but no civilized person would now justify the rhyme as regards wives. The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses."

Dogmatic Anti-Dogmatism At Its Finest
Lord Russell sets the indicative tone for this collection of mostly polemical essays in his Preface, when he explains his choice of the adjective "Unpopular" in his title."...There are several sentences in the present volume which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling.On this ground I do not claim that the essays are popular; and if not popular, then 'unpopular.'"Russell says exactly what he thinks, has no patience for fools and does not hesitate to ridicule muddled thinking and wrong-headed beliefs wherever he may find them.

This work contains 10 essays written between 1935 and 1950, with the common theme being the pernicious impact of dogmatic, unsupportable beliefs.By and large, Russell is highly effective in making his case across a broad range of topics, from the debunking of philosophy's giants such as Plato ("That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history."), Aristotle ("Aristotle, in spite of his reputation, is full of absurdities.") and Hegel ("To anyone who still cherishes the hope that man is a more or less rational animal, the success of this farrago of nonsense must be astonishing.") to the fallacies of discrimination against women, xenophobia and our modern public education system.

His sharpest attacks are reserved for Man's superstitions and particularly for those of the religious variety.Russell is a well-known rationalist thinker and atheist and his views are driven by the common sense dictum that one should only believe that which has sufficient supporting, scientific evidence.This leads to the view that deism is unlikely and that modern revealed religions are pure folly.He convincingly notes the common drivers of these fatuous beliefs across epochs to be fear, a need for self-importance, ignorance and socialization.

My primary issue with Russell is that, while he ostensibly ascribes to a "Liberal" worldview (i.e. a scientific perspective on facts and opinions that holds positions tentatively with a "consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.") and excoriates dogmatic beliefs, he can be, in fact, highly dogmatic in the presentation of his views.This is particularly disturbing when he ventures into areas he clearly does not fully grasp, such as economics.In "The Future of Mankind" (far and away the weakest of the 10 essays), he makes the highly naïve, silly statement that "Unless we can cope with the problem of abolishing war, there is no reason whatever to rejoice in labor-saving techniques, but quite the reverse."His point is that higher labor productivity leads to a lower labor requirement to generate life's necessities, thereby freeing up more people for war.Refuting this nonsense hardly seems necessary, but it should be clear that labor does not automatically flow from food production to war production and that more evolved economies do not automatically lead to more war mongering.

Notwithstanding these occasional pratfalls from the platform of reason, Russell is for the most part extremely lucid in his analyses and views.He is also sharp-witted and entertaining in his gleeful exposition of folly.All of this results in prose which is remarkably easy to read while provoking rational thought and leads to my 4-star rating.

Great style, clear thinking
I had never read anything by Bertrand Russell before. I thought he would be difficult, but these essays were lucid and humorous. He manages to demolish the theories of almost every great philosopher of the past. His predictions for the future, either chaos or world government, haven't materialized yet, but either is still a possibility. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Unique Russell
Anti-catholic, pro-jewish, and maybe the most important brain of our corrupt, insane, and bygone 20th century, Russell speaks for a generation that is starting to realize certain inviolable truths vital to the continuation of mankind.Doomed as we are, cynical as I am, and one-hundred per cent correct Russell is when stating human nature is actually corrigible.For when this aspect is fixed, and humans will no longer emulate quasi-virus patterns and replicate wars over and over, only then can Russell be judged as right or wrong regarding the fate of man.What is peace?What is war? What is knowledge?I consider Russell the king of intellectual snobs. ... Read more

Book Description

In the second half of his life, Bertrand Russell transformed himself from a major philosopher, whose work was intelligible to a small elite, into a political activist and popular writer, known to millions throughout the world. Yet his life is the tragic story of a man who believed in a modern, rational approach to life and who, though his ideas guided popular opinion throughout the twentieth century, lost everything.

Russell's views on marriage, religion, education, and politics attracted legions of devoted followers and, at the same time, provoked harsh attacks from every direction. On the one hand, he was stripped of his post at New York's City College because he was thought to be a bad influence on his students, and on the other, he was awarded the Order of Merit, the Nobel Prize in literature, and a lifetime Fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge. He lived to be ninety-seven, and as he became older he became increasingly controversial. Monk quotes Russell's telegrams to Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, an influence that Russell and his followers believed tipped the balance toward peace. Russell devoted his last years to a campaign organized by his secretary to lend support to Che Guevara's call for a globally coordinated revolutionary struggle against "U.S. imperialism." Until now, this last campaign has been misunderstood as a -- perhaps misguided, but nevertheless innocent -- plea for world peace. Monk reveals it was no such thing.

Drawing on thousands of documents collected at the Russell archives in Canada, Monk steers through the turbulence of Russell's public activities, scrutinizing his sometimes paradoxical and often outrageous pronouncements. Monk's focus, however, is on the tragedy of Russell's personal life, and in revealing this inner drama Monk has relied heavily on the cooperation of Russell's surviving relatives and access to previously unexamined legal and private correspondence. A central player in Russell's life was his first son, John. Russell applied the methods of the new science of child psychology in his parenting, believing that a new generation of children could be reared to be "independent, fearless, and free." But instead of being a model of this new generation, John became anxious, withdrawn, and eventually schizophrenic. Nor was John's daughter Lucy (who was Russell's favorite grandchild) to be a model of the new generation; gradually she grew so emotionally disturbed that, at the age of twenty-six, she took her own life.

The Ghost of Madness completes the most searching examination yet published of Bertrand Russell's unique life and work. Together with Ray Monk's highly praised first volume of the biography, The Spirit of Solitude, this is the classic account of an extraordinary man who championed the great ideas of the twentieth century and was all but destroyed by them. It is a portrait of the mind of a century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Thanks Ray!

Having read "Wittgenstein", then vol 1 of this biography, this was a natural and exciting follower. I certainly have to wonder what connection there is to a life associated, at least ab initio, with mathematics and failure in one's personal life. Considering the connection between logic, mathematics, and reasoning, and our need for success with those to be successful in one's life in general, this certainly brings up an issue of a golden mean between extremes. It perhaps also brings up an issue of autism and the genetic predisposition to autism as a range of autism might on one hand lead to outstanding mathematical accomplishment accompanied by outstanding social failure.

It is such a shame that such a great mind would give up such important work for lack of - self discipline? Self control? A family madness? Most telling I thought was the quote given in response to the question "Why did you give up philosophy?" Since his response is shocking but stabs to the heart of the personal difficulties experienced by BR and successfully passed on to almost all of his children and grandchildren one has to wonder was this nurture or nature. A clue seems to be the success of those who had the earliest and longest break in contact. The less contact the more success?

Perhaps an errata sheet should be made available regarding the apparent deleted words. One sentence especially seemed to need "not" to make sense in context, but in general I found my reading to be abruptly halted with the awareness of a word missing - in a context where I could know precisely what word would have been right. I half wonder if RM was using a new word processor or something? I did not notice this at all with vol. 1.

Regardless, of all the things worth reading this will always be high on my recommend list. Great philosophers are easier to understand when we know as much as we can about them as persons. Thanks Ray! Eternally grateful.

Autobiography vs. biography
Because of Russell's political views (his opposition to war and U.S. imperialism) he has always been the subject of attacks by other intellectuals (the late Sidney Hook is a prime example).One only has to compare Monk's work on Russell to his biography of Wittgenstein ("The Duty of Genius" says it all).The interesting thing about each of Monk's biographies is that while both men led solitary lives and maintained erratic beliefs and behavior, Russell is castigated as a "madman" while Wittgenstein is a "genius."It is far too easy as a biographer to portray intellectual celebrities as either geniuses or madman.If you want to hear from the person, Bertie Russell, read his biography instead.

A tormented volcanic island who spilled a lot of lavae
This exceptional book is a sequel to The Spirit of Solitude, written by Ray Amok, which covers the first 50 years of Russell's life, and which could be summarized by achieving world fame and academic glory by means of his early work as a philosophical mathematician, specially trough his "Principia Matematica",a monumental theoretical work, with the co-authorship of Whitehead.

Ray Monk magistrally portrays Russell as facing now the challenge of taking a new direction to his life, trying to achieve the same level of academical glory when entering into new fields of knowledge. The story is of a genius who had to prove to himself that he had not lost his intelectual vigour in the ageing proccess and at the same time , balancing his mundane needs trough popular texts written to readers not specialized in philosophy and mathematics, and many other areas where he was proficient.

He marriages now for the second time in his life, with Dora, with he would generate a son (John) and a daughter (Kate), began for him a new era as an educator and as a mass-comunicator, where he approached all the available means (newspapers, magazines, radio panels and lectures) in order to make money thus providing the material means for his special ideas on how to educate hischildren. He wrote many books on the subject and even inaugurated a special school where his two children where educated along with the children of some upper-class Englishmen and Americans.

He was two be married again twice and to have more children with Peter (yes, a very special nickname of his third wive). In terms of the outcome he got, it was nothing anyone could foresee at the beginning.

To sum it up, the book is a faithful portrait of a tormentedman, surrounded by all kinds of people who loved/hated him, and who seems to destroy everyinch of happiness one could have beforegetting to know him. Strange as it seems, the man who was trying to save the world with his pacifist stand against nazism, and later comunism, and all forms of totalitarianism, was incapable of understand the human nature of all people who lived with him.

This is a good book to read to everyone interested in philosophy and in the life of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Remarkable biography.
The chilling story of Bertrand Russell's disastrous later life: his ferocious battles with his children, wives and mistresses, his financial needs covered by second-rate newspaper articles and American lectures for older women, his sometimes quite naive political struggles on the side of socialism (all land and capital must be the property of the State) and the peace movement. At the end of his life, he allowed himself to be totally neutralized by an American CIA agent (I quote Bryan Magee). For the author, the reason for these disasters were two fundamental traits of Russell's character: a deep seated fear of madness (a constant in his family) and a quite colossal vanity.
The big shock of his life was the destructive First World War. He became a profound misanthrope, who lost all confidence in humanity. It put nearly an end to all serious philisophical and mathematical work.
Thoroughly documented and extremely well narrated work. The author is very good acquainted with philosophy and mathematics. I miss one name in this provoking work: Karl Popper.

Painful revelations for Russell lovers
I wanted to name my son "Russell" (if I had a son), at one point. In college and (philosophy) grad school I was a tremendous admirer of Russell, in particular his "On Denoting" and other explications of how language and logic works. As a college student in the late '60s I was also impressed and influenced by his staunch (and early) opposition to the Viet Nam war.

So reading The Ghost of Madness was a sad revelation. I had already read, with great enjoyment, Monk's Duty of Genius and Spirit of Solitude, but this volume took me quite a while to get through, cause on nearly every page there was another revelation of Russell's pettiness, and just-plain-meanness, especially to his schizophrenic son and granddaughter, Lucy.

Monk's other 2 main works deserve 5 stars, this one one less cause he lost any semblance of an "objective" biographer's stance (I know I know "objectivity" is problematic...), starting with the preface and acknowledgements. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Great selection of russell's more technical papers
I would give 5 stars to Russell's essays but 3 stars to this edition.
This edition contains most of the important/technical papers that russel wrote & are still worth reading for any serious philosophy student. The editor did a great job at selection but his snobbish introductory essays prefacing each russell essay is a complete waste of space & (your) time. The editor should have but didn't bother to update the logical symbols in the 1st russell essay, 'logic of relations', with the result that it would be incomprehensible even to people trained in symbolic logic.
'philosophy of logical atomism', for me anyway, helps me understand wittgenstein's Tractatus, which was otherwise incomprehsible to me.
I didn't make it through 'on denoting'. Who would really care about this important but by now mainly historical essay if you have already learned quantification theory & description theory?

On Denoting
This book reproduces Russell's famous article 'On Denoting' that appeared in "Mind" in 1905.It provides the earliest account of his theory of descriptions that was later developed in principia mathematicaand 'improved' by W.V Quine. (It is however, a dog to read!) It is truly afundamental work in logical analysis and I recommend it to you all. ... Read more

Book Description

The Philosophy of Leibniz is Bertrand Russell's first strictly philosophical work, and remains one of the most important studies of Leibniz ever published. This work established an approach to studying philosophers of the past that emphasizes the philosophical rather than the historical. In Russell's own words, "Philosophic truth and falsehood, in short, rather than historical fact, are what primarily demand our attention in this inquiry."

Russell's interpretation emphasized the logical and deductive power of Leibniz's system in opposition to the standard interpretations that had previously led Russell to believe that "the Monadology was a kind of fantastic fairy tale." This paperback edition of The Philosophy of Leibniz includes an introduction by John G. Slater of the University of Toronto.

Customer Reviews (2)

Historically important work, but dismissible for its contents
Russell's famous work is of great importance historically because it set the tone for Leibniz study for a generation. Today this tone has been completely rejected by modern Leibniz scholars. Russell's work says more about Russell than Leibniz. Russell uses Leibniz as a punching bag to push his dogma. I recommend the many papers and journal entries written over the last 100 years which basically have proven almost every major attack Russell made on Leibniz to be unjustified. Still, this book is a must read for any serious Leibniz scholar for its historical importance alone and to understand why so many scholars after Russell had the narrow interpretation of Leibniz that they did.

Important for the history of predicate logic crtiques
As Russell lays out Leibniz' system giving five axioms and critiques two as false, we have an interesting historical analysis of predicate logic as well as the analytic - synthetic distinction both pre-Kant, and a la Russell. This is certainly bound to interest logicians and historians of logic as well as Leibniz students. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Relatively poor
In his History of Western Philosophy, Russell makes the progression of thousands of years of the biggest thinkers in the West read like a suspense thriller.I was hoping he could do the same with Einstein's relativity.

No such luck.Though he writes this especially for the lay person, Russell often seems to lose patience with his intended audience, becoming frustrated at them for not having the education to "get" what he's saying but then saying it anyway.Which, to me, is a sign that he became disenchanted with the premise of the book as he plowed through it, which to me is a failure, which to me suggests that maybe Russell didn't have such a masterful grasp on these complex ideas yet himself.He only wrote the book in 1925, when the whole world was still fumbling around trying to figure out what Einstein had done (we still are).

If you are a non-physicist like me and really want to understand one of the human race's most elegant and significant concepts, I recommend looking elsewhere.Lewis Epstein's _Relativity Visualized_ might be a good place to start.

ABZ of Relativity
I think this book can justifiably be called ABZ of relativity. The author sincerely tries to tell us about relativity by building up from basic elements, but at the point it gets to the stuff that is supposed be really interesting, it becomes unintelligible for the less gifted. He gives three pages to tell us about the difference between mass and weight, but the central concept of "interval" is used for some pages before being poorly defined and explained. I am positively sure he understands relativity and all, and I am sure those definitions are correct in the strictest sense, however they didn't help a beginner, at least in this case. Having said this though, this book is still a very nice read and could be read even if only for its strange humor and wisecracks.

A Philosopher who truly understands relativity
Bertrand Russel was an excellent writer, and one of the few philosophers who truly understood relativity. This book is also a classic. However, the book attempts to explain relativity to the layman using "text" only. The book is not mathematical, and it contains very few graphs or diagrams. This is not the best approach to explaining relativity. Good graphs/diagrams/images can to a certain extent replace equations. There are many modern introductory books and multimedia presentations that does a better at job at introducing relativity.

I recommend this book as a "classic", but not as an introduction to relativity for the non-physicist. ... Read more

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Russell's Antidote to the Monist Metaphysicians
Bertrand Russell, one of the fathers of modern analytical philosophy, started out as a student of the Hegelian, F. H. Bradley, but soon found himself in opposition to the kind of "monist" thinking Bradley exemplified. Russell made his major contributions to philosophy early on in the field of symbolic logic, which he all but revolutionized, and in the philosophy of mathematics, when he applied a logicist approach to establishing the fundamentals of mathematics in a joint effort with Alfred North Whitehead.

But Russell is not well remembered or studied today for this work though he lived a very long life thereafter and was much in the public eye as a peace activist, outspoken atheist (and some time agnostic) and all around spokesman for progressive ideas. What Russell is especially well known for in philosophical circles, however, is his role as teacher and mentor to the even more controversial and philosophically influential Viennese transplant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Cambridge philosopher who supplanted him and whose work helped undermine the logical foundations Russell had built for mathematics.

Wittgenstein first sought Russell out when, as an engineering student in England, he became fascinated by Russell's work. After their initial meeting Wittgenstein became his student and, at least at the outset, Russell's designated successor. It was during his time with Russell that Wittgenstein developed ideas, under Russell's tutelage, which were to influence Russell himself and, as Russell notes repeatedly in this book, became the source for Russell's own new philosophy of logical atomism.

Premised on Russell's opposition to Hegelian monism (the idea that everything is only fully comprehensible when seen as part of a greater whole), logical atomism was Russell's attempt to develop a metaphysics which accounted for the common sense reality of our experience and was consistent with the empirical tradition in British philosophy which stretched back at least as far as David Hume. Russell credits Wittgenstein in this book with having generated the ideas that led him to formulate logical atomism, a philosophy that sought to account for the world in all its various aspects by relating it to the structure of the language in which we articulate information about it.

Russell's fundamental aim, as he says in the lectures in this book, was to develop an "ideal" language, based on pure logic, which did away with all the ambiguities of everyday language and enabled us to describe things with superior accuracy and effectiveness for scientific purposes. In so doing he posited, with Wittgenstein, that our language, when properly clarified, broke down into a series of components which mirrored the world. Thus we could come to know our world rightly only by developing, learning and using this clarified form of communication, this ideal language.

Russell drew on the developments he had pioneered in symbolic logic to offer a breakdown of reality in terms of his reformed language. Fundamental in his assumptions was the claim that proper names as we normally used them were explainable via a theory of descriptions (each name seen as a shorthand for a series of descriptive propositions) whereas true names could not be broken down at all.

True names, for Russell, would be nothing like names as we normally use the term. Indeed, he posited that names in this sense would be things like "this" and "that" as used only at the moment when a this or a that was within our actual observation. Really basic components of reality, he argued, were fleeting sensory experiences like patches of colors in our visual field and everything we knew in reality was built up of these more basic, albeit fleeting, elements.

Language, argued Russell, must be seen, in its purest form, to mirror this breakdown bit for bit or, better, atom of experience for atom of expression. In so doing, language could be broken down to its components in the same way as reality could be broken down. But, while reality could only be broken down in this way theoretically (i.e., we could never see the real components of our experience in isolation in any integrated and useful way), language, he argued, could in fact be deconstructed to reveal its atomic parts and that was the real job of philosophy.

Along the same vein, propositions in language, he suggested, stated facts, understood as states of affairs which consisted of combinations of experienced phenomena which somehow existed in the world in a manner that paralleled how they were combined in our language. He suggested there were atomic and molecular propositions (the latter being so-called simple propositions combined by logical conjunctions). In this, he was no doubt deeply influenced by the new physics then taking hold and dominating scientific thinking, a physics which saw the material world as consisting of atoms and molecules. Overall, in this book, which is the definitive compilation of Russell's logical atomism, he is at great pains to develop this new linguistic metaphysic which he thought would enable us to speak more accurately about the world, a world he held, that was pluralist and thus "atomic," not "monist" in its fundamental form.

The most obvious thing one comes away with from these readings is just how artificial and convoluted Russell's efforts to construct a suitably empiricist metaphysic in this way appear to be. The lectures consistently devolve into logical minutiae, false trails and digressions. Russell repeatedly backs away from his own claims, saying more work needs to be done here or that he is just not able to clearly state what he wants to say there. Russell's argument for logical atomism, as noted by D. F. Pears in his introduction, is premised on several confused notions and diverges from Wittgenstein's parallel rationalist approach as exemplified in his own Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (written during this same period).

Unlike Wittgenstein, Russell takes an empiricist approach, hoping to build up his metaphysical picture from the ground of actual observations as he presents his listeners with the atomic facts of a piece of chalk immediately before their eyes and speaks of "simples" which may somehow be found in the world. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, employed a reasoning process according to Pears in order to claim that so-called logical atoms must be there, even if no one had as yet actually found them. In the end, Wittgenstein gave up the hope of finding genuine atomic facts and propositions in favor of a revised view which, contrary to Russell's approach, found clarity in attention to ordinary language and not in some idealized form built on an artificial logical framework. Russell, though he subsequently revised his views, and gradually ceased pushing logical atomism to any great extent, never went along with his former pupil's new insights which saw language as its own phenomenon and not merely a reflector of something else.

But even before Wittgenstein's new thinking took hold, the logical positivism of the thinkers of the Vienna Circle, already under Wittgenstein's influence, supplanted Russell's unsuccessful empiricist metaphysic with a new approach that denied metaphysics entirely in favor of testing for logical sense via a demand that propositions either be empirically or analytically verifiable. If they failed such a test, the logical postivists, more radical than Russell, excluded them from the realm of sense entirely. Wittgenstein thought they missed his point, too, as he moved in fits and starts into his later period and his notion that philosophy was really about the language in which our ideas were couched, not about the world or its underlying ontology at all.

Russell's lectures in this book are fascinating for those with an interest in early analytical philosophy but they are mired in endless peregrinations as Russell struggles through what seems a dense forest of complexity to build a convincing picture of a logical atomist reality that cannot be easily articulated or, perhaps, satisfactorily articulated at all. This book is useful for understanding the later analytical work of Wittgenstein and those who were influenced by him, but it offers little beyond an historical record of an admirable, albeit failed, attempt to establish a new way of thinking.

SWM

Solid work by one of the top minds of the Century
An excellent short introduction to the philosophy of logical atomism. Thelectures should be read along with Wittgenstein's TractatusLogico-Philosophicus. Russell's logical atomism differs significantly fromWittgenstein's version of the theory but both share certain key featureswhich make the theory distinctive. Those who enjoy "mathematicalPhilosophy" will not be disappointed.

A Good Launching Pad for Russell's More Academic Philosophy
This brief work serves as a fine introduction to the academic Russell for those curious about what distinguishes him among philosophers of the twentieth century and/or for those chiefly familiar with his "popular" works, such as "Why I Am Not a Christian" and "Marriage and Morals."

While Philosophy of Logical Atomism certainly does not cover his academic philosophy in depth, and it contains a number of points that he later amended (this is true of much of his academic philosophy), it is a good starting point for the Russell initiate as he can be a very difficult read in other academic texts.

The Theory of Descriptions and the Theory of Types are both presented here.The Theory of Descriptions in its "indefinite" and "definite" form (as opposed to its presence as only the Definite Theory of Descriptions in Principia Mathematica).

Anyone with a serious interest in analytical philosophy should be familiar with this material, and at the very least, the Philosophy of Logical Atomism will defintely tell you who wrote Waverly. ... Read more

Book Description
Bertrand Russell ranks as one of the giants of 20th century philosophy.This Companion focuses on Russell's contributions to modern philosophy and, therefore, concentrates on the early part of his career. Through his books, journalism, correspondence and political activity he exerted a profound influence on modern thought. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Russell available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Russell.Download Description
Bertrand Russell ranks as one of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy. Through his books, journalism, correspondence and political activity he exerted a profound influence on modern thought. This companion centers on Russell's contributions to modern philosophy and, therefore, concentrates on the early part of his career. There are chapters on Russell's contributions to the foundations of mathematics, and on his development of new logical methods in philosophy and their application to such fields as epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. The intellectual background to his work is covered, as is his engagement with such contemporaries as Frege and G. E. Moore. The final chapter considers Russell as a moral philosopher. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Russell available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Russell. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

An Appropiate Selection of Topics
This volume is, in my view, an excellent introduction to its subject, namely Bertrand Russell. The introduction by Nicholas Griffin is superb, and indeed has suggested to me new avenues for the investigation of Russell's thought (such as the controversy between realists and anti-realists regarding the Law of the Excluded Middle, or his definition of Scepticism in AMa as a boundary problem), it then goes on, to examine the place of Mathematics in Russell's thought and Russell's contributions to Mathematics, it then sketches the young Russell's views regarding Idealism and his rejection of Kant and Hegel as well as his short-lived partnership with G.E. Moore, it then goes on to give an account of his Logicism (the view which takes mathematics to be in some sense reducible to logic) of his Theory of Types for solving the paradox which bears his name and his Theory of Definite Descriptions in an excellent paper by Peter Hylton which shows ways to evade Kripke's criticisms of the russellian analysis of proper names in terms of definite descriptions. Michael Beaney, editor of The Frege Reader, also contributes with an splendid 70 page paper on the philosophies of Frege and Russell. There is a complicated paper in the jargon of mathematical logic dealing with one of Russell's attempts, a sophisticated one, to deal with the paradoxes in set theory, namely the Substitutional Theory, but it is mostly here, and a bit in the paper on Types where mathematical logic features more proficiently. Most of the papers in the book are quite intelligible without much knowledge of logic. The second part of the book deals mostly with Russell's Metaphysics and his Theory of Knowledge, kudos to Grayling and Demopoulos on two astonishing papers, by the former on Russell's desire to explain the relation of individual phenomenal experience to science and by the latter on an account of Russell's view of physics as something which gives structural knowledge of the world by applying to the interpretation of said science the relation-arithmetic which he worked out in Principia Mathematica. As is well known Russell gave an account of the structure of the world around 1918 which purported to explain the sort of facts, qualities and relations that should exist on account of logic, a paper by Bernard Linsky deals with this. The volume ends brilliantly with a well-thought out and philosophically exciting paper by Charles Pigden in which he sketches out for criticism some of Russell's views regarding world government (in the way making some enlightening comparisons with Thomas Hobbes), and suggests that Russell's ethical philosophy is much more original and important than what is generally thought, for he invented Error theory and Emotivism.


Anyone who knows of Russell's place in philosophy will not be surprised to see that more or less half of this book deals with topics in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. The birth of so-called Analytic Philosophy can be traced down to the philosophico-mathematical investigations of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and Russell's place in philosophy as one of the greatest philosophers of the XX century is firmly grounded in his philosophical work during the first twenty years of the twentieth century where such books as Principia Mathematica and The Principles of Mathematics occupy a prominent place. Indeed, a great deal of analytic philosophy is concerned with language and philosophical logic where topics such as reference (which greatly occupied Russell's thought) hold an important place. It was Russell who said that his greatest accomplishment was his theory of definite descriptions, this theory, as Russell understood it, was valuable not only for its logical or linguistic applications but mainly for its applications in areas such as Epistemology, the Philosophy of Mathematics and Metaphysics. Whomever has read some of Russell's later works, for instance Human Knowledge, won't be surprised by the extent in which in that book he investigates what sort of thing is a Proper Name. Indeed throughout his philosophy Russell held that one could be misled by the grammar of natural language in assuming certain features of the world which logic showed to be in principle disposable. For instance one may assume that the sentences "Greeks are Men" and "Socrates is a Man" attribute a predicate to a subject and thus think that the world must contain only properties and particulars whereas in fact "Greeks are Men" is logically extremely different from "Socrates is a Man", the first says that if anything is a greek that is a man, the second that something unique Socrates has the property of being a man. These sort of things are puzzling and extremely important and relevant to debates about Existence, the Structure of the World, the sort of things the World contains, the sort of thing that is mathematics, the relation of language to fact, and of mental acts (belief, desire, etc) to language and to facts. Indeed much muddleheadedness in philosophy, as Russell tried in his life to make us see, is a consequence of neglecting the logic of our language. The puzzle about "The Present King of France is bald" is extremely relevant to all this, for how are such sentences significant when there is no such thing as a Present King of France ? To what are we attributing such a property ? How can we say anything about non-existent things ? If there is a non-existent King of France are there other non-existents and if so, what sort of existential status do they have since they do not exist ? All of these are tremendously important philosophical enigmas which Russell's theory of descriptions answers swiftly. It is important to realize that Russell's most striking and original contributions are in the abstract fields of logic, philosophical logic and the philosophy of mathematics; indeed though he wrote an enormous amount of books on religion and politics, most of them, though superbly written and provocative, where written for the purpose of rational persuasion rather than philosophicalinvestigation, indeed much of what Russell says on religion has been said by others, like Voltaire for instance, and his disposal of the arguments for the existence of God is of course not novel, as is well known Kant smashed all philosophico-theological arguments for the existence of God in his Critique in the eighteenth century; it is therefore no surprise that a volume which deals with Russell as a philosopher focuses, like this one, where it does; since it is those abstract problems in mathematics, language, the philosophy of physics, epistemology, scientific inference and metaphysics which Russell saw as the proper domain of philosophy and where his mark is still most felt. Regrettably this book does not mention the Russellian solution to the mind-body problem which has featured prominently in contemporary works in the philosophy of Mind such as Chalmers (1996) and Lockwood (1989); an article about the philosophies of Russell and Wittgenstein would have been welcome too. This book is not for everyone, but undergraduate students of philosophy, specialists and people interested in the most abstract features of Russell's thought will benefit greatly from studying this elegant, sharp and thought-provoking volume.

Reflecting Russell's True Legacy
There are at least four Bertrand Russells:The English aristocrat whose values were forged during the Edwardian revolt against Victorianism, the mathematical logician, the Nobel Prize winning popular author and the radical activist.The authors of this collection have obviously decided to focus on Russell the mathematical logician of the period between 1900-1920, with a little attention to some of his later work in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science.Undoubtedly, this reflects Russell's true legacy to philosophy and his ongoing influence in that discipline.Unfortunately, most people know Russell from his popular writings, which, though they often deal with topics discussed by philosophers (such as God and morality) are hardly distinguished by the sort of rigor or seriousness that a genuinely philosophical discussion of these questions deserve.Most of his essays on these topics date badly and are of no more than sociological interest today; the views he expresses, however radical they may have been at the time, have become (even if true - and that is certainly debateable) either banal through repetition or long since bypassed in the course of philosophical discussion.They may still be read with pleasure by some but not to much profit by anyone who has kept abreast of philosophical developments in these areas.Russell's genius in mathematics and logic (like Einstein's in physics) was not reflected in most of the other areas to which he turned his active mind, such as religion, politics and educational theory despite the fact that his authority was often accepted in these areas as well.As such, his popular influence is well out of proportion to his actual contribution to the philosophical discussion of these questions.His writings on these topics can be and are increasingly being ignored by serious philosophers, a fact mirrored by the composition of this collection.Nevertheless, since the questions to which Russell's work is still relevant are abstract, complex and of interest largely to specialists, this emphasis means that a collection of this sort is only going to have limited accessibility to and interest for the reader whose main entree to Russell is something like The ABC of Relativity, Marriage and Morals or Why I am not a Christian.

Excellent Book
Very helpful.Deals with Russell's work in modern philosophy (and, so, his earlier writings), rather than his activities as a political activist.

How could Cambridge do this to one of their own
I have never felt compelled to review any book before. I have read 14 of the Cambridge Companions, some of them have been spotty but this one should be thrown out and the second edition let out to a new editor.

The biographical introduction explains Russell's long varied and interesting career. It then spends the first half of the book on articles on his logic. Most of these articles are not written in English but in an academic jargon of symbolic logic, pages and pages of it. (If you buy the book read chapter 3 and skip the rest.) The book then goes on to be a little more interesting concerning his epistomology and metaphysics.

The final chapter concerns whether he was a moral philospher and I believe justifies that he was.

But the book barely notes what his moral philosphy was, anything about his political philosophy and nothing about his comments on religion. Russell spent a large part of his life expressing couragious and unpopular ideas. This volume totally ignores this aspect of his works and concentrates on how one might legitimately say "The current King of France is bald" (hint- there is no current King of France)While this is an interesting logical question, it is not worth 300 pages. ... Read more