The Great Philosophers: Russell (Paperback) - Ray Monk

'War does not determine who is right - only who is left' Bertrand Russell A fascinating and engaging introduction to one of the modern age's undisputed giants.

'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.

About the Author

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.