The Great Philosophers: Russell

'The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts' Bertrand Russell

'Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know'

Bertrand Russell discovered mathematics at the age of eleven. It was, he recalled, a transporting experience: 'as dazzling as first love'. From that moment on, he would pursue his passion with undying devotion and fervour. Mathematics might succeed, he felt, where philosophy had failed, reducing thought to its purest form, and freeing knowledge from doubt and contradiction. And for a time, so it seemed. Russell's mathematical investigations effortlessly resolved at a stroke some of philosophy's most intractable problems. Yet if mathematics could be a liberating mistress, she was also an unreliable one...

Opening up the work of one of our age's undisputed giants, Ray Monk's exhilaratingly clear, readable guide tells a compelling human tale too: a moving story of love and loss, of ecstatic triumph and deep disillusion.

The virtue of these deceptively brief books is that they are the real thing EVENING STANDARD
The books should improve the cultural circulation of philosophy by their style as well as their substance TES
A promising venture THE TIMES
Rarely have intellectual sophistication and complexity come so cheap FINANCIAL TIMES
If you want to acquire some first-hand experience of philosophy and democracy you would do well to read this welcome series TIMES HIGHER EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT

Ray Monk is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Southampton. He won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 1991 Duff Cooper Prize for Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and has also written biographies of Bertrand Russell and J. Robert Oppenheimer. His chief interests now lie in environmental activism and the promotion of veganism.

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