Abstract

Concerned with Russell's early work, written when he was still an adherent of the idealist tradition. The author pays particular attention to Russell's 1897 book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. Russell argued that geometry was one stage in a ‘dialectic of the sciences’. Each stage would be shown, in Hegelian fashion, to be inadequate if taken by itself, and to lead naturally or inevitably to the next stage.