Abstract

Harper’s paperback series is rapidly forming an invaluable collection of established modern texts and studies for the university student. The present elegant two-volume edition of a comprehensive set of twenty-one expert analyses of the main themes of Earl Russell’s philosophy, with his personal introduction and replies, reprints a 1944 American publication whose distinguished contributors included Reichenbach, Gödel, Moore and Einstein under the genial prompting of Professor Schilpp. It remains a lucidly authoritative guide to a public sage, whose sixty years of writing have coloured the spectrum from impersonal geometry to the militant leadership of a Ban-the-Bomb movement, and to a seminal force in the past half-century’s logical empiricism whose ‘fateful “fear of metaphysics”’ is gently deprecated by Einstein.