"IS THERE SUCH A THING AS WISDOM, OR IS WHAT SEEMS SUCH MERELY THE ULTIMATE REFINEMENT OF FOLLY?"

RUSSELL, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. London: George Allen and Unwin, (1946). Octavo, original off-white cloth, original dust jacket.

First British edition of Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell's popular history of philosophy, in original dust jacket.

Russell first studied mathematics at Cambridge before moving to philosophy, eventually combining the two in his principal works of philosophy, which deeply influenced his most brilliant student, Wittgenstein. When Russell had difficulty finding a permanent teaching position in England after WWI, he looked to the U.S., where he "at last succeeded in securing an academic appointment, albeit a temporary one: a one-year visiting professorship at the University of Chicago, starting in autumn 1938. Russell hoped that it would be renewed but, despite the success of his seminars, which were attended by many notable philosophers, including Carnap, Russell was obliged in 1939, at the age of 67, to seek work elsewhere. This time he found a three-year appointment at the UCLA, but within a few months of taking up this position he was applying for other jobs, dissatisfied with both the standard of his students and the autocracy of the university's management. He hoped to find something on the east coast, and was much gratified when, in 1940, he was invited to deliver the prestigious William James lectures at Harvard, lectures which were published as An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. In the same year he was offered and accepted a professorship at the College of the City of New York, but in a much publicized case he was prevented from taking this up because of objections to the views on sex and marriage that he had published in the 1920s. He was then saved from financial ruin by securing a position teaching the history of philosophy at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Though he soon fell out with the notoriously difficult Dr. Barnes and was sacked, Russell was able to turn these lectures into History of Western Philosophy, which proved to be a best-seller and was for many years the main source of his income" (DNB). Albert Einstein declared Russell's History "a work that is in the highest degree pedagogical which stands above the conflicts of parties and opinions" (Russell, Autobiography), and when Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, the Nobel committee listed this as one of the works that influenced its decision. The volume covers the origins of Greek philosophy; the great Greek philosophers; Roman offshoots; Catholic philosophy; the beginnings of modern philosophy in the Renaissance; and later philosophers, including Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, William James, and John Dewey. Dust jacket printed on previously printed paper, with map on verso. "First published in 1946" on the copyright page. The first edition was published in the United States in 1945.

Book extremely good, with light foxing mainly to edges of text block and mild toning to extremities of original cloth. Dust jacket extremely good, with slight spotting to rear panel and flaps, and light wear to extremities. A desirable copy.