Principia Mathematica, the monumental, three-volume work coauthored with Alfred North Whitehead and published in 1910–13, was the culmination of BR’s work on the foundations of mathematics. Conceived around 1901 as a replacement for the projected second volumes of BR’s Principles of Mathematics (1903) and of Whitehead’s Universal Algebra (1898), PM was intended to show how classical mathematics could be derived from purely logical principles. For a large swath of arithmetic this was done by actually producing the derivations. A fourth volume on geometry, to be written by Whitehead alone, was never finished. In 1925–27 BR, on his own, produced a second edition, adding a long introduction, three appendices and a list of definitions to the first volume and corrections to all three. (See B. Linsky, The Evolution of Principia Mathematica [Cambridge U. P., 2011].) In this edition, under the influence of Wittgenstein, he attempted to extensionalize the underlying intensional logic of the first edition.
This edition of Russell’s prison letters is fully annotated with letter images and reliable texts — the texts edited anew in the case of the few letters already published. The texts are printed as Russell wrote them. There are exceptions for clarity: the expansion of lower-case abbreviations, italics for some logical symbols, italics or quote marks for publications, and correction of misspelled words that aren’t names (mistakes in names can be important). See the textual notes and images for individual letters. Sources are given for the originals of the letters edited here, as well as citations of any previous publications thereof.
There are three frequently appearing bibliographical references: “Papers” is The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 18 vols. to date); “Auto.”, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967–69); “SLBR”, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. N. Griffin, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 1992, 2001).
Edited by Kenneth Blackwell, Andrew G. Bone, Nicholas Griffin and Sheila Turcon.
Arlene Duncan, editorial assistant and typesetter.
Student research assistants: Geneva Gillis, Graeme Lavender, Jaskaran Basuita.
Our thanks to McMaster University Library for generously funding the development of this website for The Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell and to the Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections for providing scans of documents in its care.
Bertrand Russell’s letters © McMaster University, 2018.