Russell

I have more than a shelf of Russell in my library, and this new volume is on the technical end. There is a biographical essay at the beginning, focusing mainly on the development of his ideas. Indeed, there is a detailed chronology of his ontological development between 1903 and 1913, the period covering the writing of Principia Mathematica with Whitehead. The chapter titles are a good indication of the content of the book, two chapters of which will only be understood by mathematicians. The chapter on mind and matter is the most immediately accessible, comparing Russell's work with that of later philosophers such as John Searle and Hilary Putnam; it also has an amusing endnote concerning the alleged refutation of Berkeley's idealism by Doctor Johnson kicking a stone: 'if he had known that his foot never touched the stone, and that both were only complicated systems of wave motions, he might have been less satisfied with his refutation.'