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Principia Mathematica (1913)

Principia Mathematica is one of the seminal works of mathematical logic co-authored by Russell and the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead over a ten-year period beginning in 1903. Originally conceived as an elaboration of Russell’s earlier Principles of Mathematics, the three volumes  Principia Mathematica eventually grew to eclipse Principles of Mathematics in scope and depth. The goal of the Principia Mathematica is to defend the logicist thesis that mathematics can be reduced to logic. Russell believed that logical knowledge enjoys a privileged status in comparison with other types of knowledge about the world. If we could know that mathematics is derived purely from logic, we could be more certain that mathematics was true.

Principia Mathematica is the subject of a single-section Summary & Analysis in the SparkNotes guide Selected Works of Bertrand Russell.

Our Knowledge of the External World (1914)

Russell wasn’t completely satisfied with his theories as laid out in  his The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and continued his work on knowledge and perception over the next several decades. One of his important contributions to the field is Our Knowledge of the External World, a collection of lectures published in 1914. In this book, Russell continues to struggle with the implications of his Cartesian assumption—that private experience is the proper place to begin philosophical inquiry. Russell doesn’t reject that notion wholeheartedly, but he is very aware of the difficulties it raises. He is aware that crossing over from the “private space” of personal experience and sensation into the “public space” of science and the physical world is a difficult leap to logically justify.

Our Knowledge of the External World is the subject of a single-section Summary & Analysis in the SparkNotes guide Selected Works of Bertrand Russell.

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