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changing his views but keeping faith with the analytical techniques derived from his logical work. He felt able, in the end, to claim a measure of success, although he knew that few of his fellow philosophers agreed with him.
    When one surveys Russell’s philosophical work, ignoring the fact that it evolved over a very long span, frequently and lengthily interrupted by many other activities, one is surprised at how continuous and logical an evolution it represents. In his own account of his philosophical development Russell states that his philosophical life divides into two, the first part consisting in an early and short-lived flirtation with idealism, the second, inspired by his discovery of new logical techniques, dominating his outlook from then on:
    There is one major division in my philosophical work; in the years 1899– 1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism and the technique of Peano in mathematical logic. This was so great a revolution as to make my previous work, except such as was purely mathematical, irrelevant to everything that I did later. The change in these years was a revolution; subsequent changes have been in the nature of an evolution.
    ( MPD 11)
    The evolution that followed the revolution was considerable, but at every point it was driven by a need to solve problems thrown up by preceding phases, or, if the problems were too great, to find alternative routes forward. This dialectical continuity of concerns shows that Charles Broad’s witticism, ‘Mr Bertrand Russell produces a new system of philosophy each year or so, and Mr G. E. Moore none at all’, although perhaps true of Moore, is not true of Russell, least of all in its hint that there was something capricious about the steps in Russell’s philosophical pilgrimage.
    In the years between taking his degree and discovering Peano – roughly, the decade of the 1890s – Russell was under the influence of German idealism as favoured by his teachers at Cambridge. The published version of his Fellowship dissertation was a Kantian account of geometry, but his main allegiance was to Hegel. He wrote a Hegelian account of number, and planned a complete idealist dialectic of the sciences aimed at proving, in Hegel’s style, that all reality is mental.
    Russell later dismissed this work, with characteristic robustness, as ‘nothing but unmitigated rubbish’ ( MPD 32). The revolution in his philosophical approach occurred, as we have seen, as a result of his joint revolt against idealism with Moore, and his discovery of the logical work of Peano. This last was particularly significant because it galvanized Russell’s ambition to derive mathematics from logic, and offered the means of doing so. The years between 1900 and 1910 were principally devoted to this task, much valuable philosophical work arising in the process. The project is mooted in The Principles of Mathematics (1903), and the detailed attempt to carry it out constitutes Principia Mathematica (1910–13). Among the classic philosophical papers produced by Russell on the way is ‘On Denoting’ (1905), some of the ideas in which have been immensely influential in the subsequent history of philosophy.
    The philosophical work of these years continued after the associated logical work was brought to an end by the publication of Principia Mathematica . Russell set about applying the techniques of analysis developed in this work to the problems of metaphysics (enquiry into the nature of reality) and epistemology (enquiry into how we get and test knowledge). His enduring little classic, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), sketches the metaphysical and epistemological views he then held. He proposed to give them more detailed treatment in subsequent writings, and began in 1913 by drafting a large book, posthumously published as Theory of Knowledge (1984). But he was dissatisfied with aspects of it, so instead of publishing it in book form he broke it up and published part of it as a