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 Visitors Recommend
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 The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
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The first section of the book named
'What I have lived for' is so brilliant that if one
has read that very one page one has read a lot. It is
a must read.
/Kedar Joshi, 25, United Kingdom |
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Power: a new Social Introduction to its Study |
Bertrand Russell's book 'Power; A new social analysis' is my favorite.
It is a small book of ~200 pages. It was published in 1938. In the Introduction, Russell places his
hypothesis; that is, 'power' is for social sciences what 'energy' is for natural sciences. I found
this comparison fascinating. He says, like energy - power also has various components which are
transferable from one form to another. Unless one understands this concept, limited focus on one
form of power will be incomplete and erroneous. In this book, Russell provides from every possible
angle - historical, religious, anthropological, social, military and political - the use and abuse
of power by humans since the beginning of civilization. I see this book as a bottle of concentrated
honey. Every chapter has to be tasted sip by sip at frequent intervals - at least that's what I
have been doing since 1988 when I bought that book in the year my elder daughter was born. Even
at the personal level, it is a fulfilling book on child rearing. How to balance power and love
for one's own children? It was not a 'great' book by reviewer's scale or popularity scale. But
unless one has the ability to at least try to think at the level of Russell (not an easy task
for sure!), mediocre minds of reviewers or readers cannot grasp the serious message dealt in
that book.
/Sachi Sri Kantha, 50, Japan |
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The Principles of Mathematics |
'The Principles of Mathematics' is, arguably, the culmination in print
of a long process of thought and concern, philosophically speaking,
of Russell's intellectual preoccupations from his adolescence,
youth and maturity with questions relating to the foundations of
mathematics. Ever since Russell read J.S. Mill in his adolescence he
had thought there was something suspect with the millian view that
mathematical knowledge is in some sense empirical. Though he lacked
the sophistication at the time to propose a different view of the
foundations in mathematics, his concerns with these topics remained
with him well into the completion of Principia Mathematica. Logic
and Mathematics were, by that time, seen as separate subjects dealing
with distinct subject-matters, it came to be, however, the intuition
of Russell (an intuition shared, and indeed, anticipated by Frege)
that mathematics was nothing more than the later stages of logic.
He did not come into this view easily, after a long period of hegelianism
and kantianism in philosophy, in which Russell sought to overcome
the so-called antinomies of the infinite and the infinitesimal,
etc; Russell saw light coming, not from the works of philosophers,
but from the work of mathematicians working to introduce rigour
in mathematics. Through the developments introduced by such mathematicians
as Cantor and Dedekind Russell saw, or indeed thought he saw, that
the difficulties in the notion of infinite and infinitesimal could
be dealt with by solely mathematical methods, and it was through
the continued development of formal logic by Peano and his followers
that Russell saw the possibility of defining the notions of zero,
number & successor in purely logical terms. Before all of these
developments and ideas were put together by Russell and developed
into the philosophy of mathematics known as logicism he made several
sophisticated though unsuccesful attempts at questions having to
do with the foundations of mathematics, one such attempt is his 'An
Analysis of Mathematical Reasoning'.
/Nadja Sleiman Monteiro, 21, Brazil |
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