Notebooks

Bertrand Russell (1872--1970)

14 Jul 2022 10:45

I first read Russell when I was nine: my parents had copies of his books in the old Simon and Schuster editions, with the attractive abstract covers, which were left on a low shelf near the science fiction. Furthermore, the back cover blurbs quoted Russell himself on how he wrote Human Knowledge so it could be understood by "an unusually bright child of ten." I neither could nor did resist the temptation, and was thoroughly imprinted. I have recently noticed that Nietzsche and Althusser live on the same shelf in my parents' home: and what might have happened, if their books had had more interesting-looking exteriors, is not pleasant to contemplate. There, but for the grace of some long-forgotten cover designer, go I...

See my on-line collection of Russell's writings.

See also: Analytical Philosophy; Causality; the Left; Logical Positivism; Mathematical Logic; Alfred North Whitehead; Norbert Wiener


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