Russell’s scarce second book and his first on the philosophy of mathematics. A revised and expanded version of Russell’s Trinity College fellowship dissertation, begun in 1895, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry “provides a partial defence of Kant’s theory that the truth of geometry is a necessary condition of all possible experience. This, Russell argues, is correct, though not of Euclidean geometry but of the more abstract and comparatively modern system of ‘projective geometry’. The truth or otherwise of the specifically Euclidean axioms Russell regards as an empirical matter. In a more general sense, however, Russell agrees with Kant in locating the foundations of geometry in the structure of our spatial intuitions. Russell later dismissed the book as a foolish and immature work, and its central claims have not been accepted by either mathematicians or philosophers. None the less, principally through being reviewed at length and with great respect by the eminent French mathematician Henri Poincaré, it served to establish Russell’s professional reputation and led to his being invited to deliver a paper at the prestigious International Congress of Philosophy held in Paris in 1900, an event that profoundly affected his career” (ODNB).
Provenance: (1) a King’s College, Cambridge prize-binding, with their arms stamped in gilt to spine and front cover, with the ownership inscription of ‘W. D. Evans’ to front free endpaper, and careful pencilled and ink annotations in the same hand; (2) thence from the library the British physicist Dennis W. Sciama (1926-1999), with his ownership inscription dated ‘1948’ in blue ink to the front free endpaper. Sciama is best-known for his contributions to the fields of astrophysics and cosmology as well for having supervised Stephen Hawking’s doctorate thesis on Properties of Expanding Universes (1966).
Blackwell & Ruja A3.1a, second binding variant (“Two variants of the publisher’s arms are noted: one with sixteen points or corners, the other with three”).
