Written when he was twenty-four, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897) is Bertrand Russell’s first book of philosophy: a study of what the new non-Euclidean geometries of Lobachevsky, Bolyai and Riemann had done to Kant’s claim that the truths of geometry are given to us a priori. Russell surveys the history of ‘metageometry’ and asks, with characteristic ruthlessness, what remains necessarily true of space.
Russell later disowned parts of the argument — Einstein saw to that — but the book remains a brilliant record of the moment when geometry stopped being certain. Download the free EPUB and catch the twentieth century’s sharpest philosopher at the very start of his run.