RUSSELL, Bertrand. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. London: George Allen and Unwin. 1948. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket printed on very fragile paper reused from the publisher’s archives having an unrelated Second World War map to verso due to paper shortages even post-war. A near fine copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, the gilt a touch dulled, the binding tight and square. The contents with some mild spots to the textblock edges and to the endpapers, else clean throughout. The dust jacket price-clipped, a few small nicks around spine head and tail, gently bumped, but a pleasing copy overall and uncommon as such.
‘Intended for the general reader’, Russell considers the pettiness of humanity by exploring the then knowable system of galaxies and passes, by stages, into our solar system, our planet, and its inhabitants ‘who imagine themselves lords of creation’. From there, he considers the epistemological history of that knowledge and its necessary pairing with skepticism. Published two years after his influential ‘A History of Western Philosophy’.
RUSSELL, Bertrand. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. London: George Allen and Unwin. 1948. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket printed on very fragile paper reused from the publisher’s archives having an unrelated Second World War map to verso due to paper shortages even post-war. A near fine copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, the gilt a touch dulled, the binding tight and square. The contents with some mild spots to the textblock edges and to the endpapers, else clean throughout. The dust jacket price-clipped, a few small nicks around spine head and tail, gently bumped, but a pleasing copy overall and uncommon as such.
‘Intended for the general reader’, Russell considers the pettiness of humanity by exploring the then knowable system of galaxies and passes, by stages, into our solar system, our planet, and its inhabitants ‘who imagine themselves lords of creation’. From there, he considers the epistemological history of that knowledge and its necessary pairing with skepticism. Published two years after his influential ‘A History of Western Philosophy’.
