Abstract
This is a very lightly edited open educational resource version of The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. It is lightly edited to approach (without yet meeting) the “truer” text of The Problems of Philosophy indicated by Kenneth Blackwell in the journal Russell.1 Student notes from the editor are included to make the text more suitable for college (or high school) students.
The basis for this edition is this 2004 version available in HTML through Project Gutenberg, produced by Gordon Keener and David Widger. After using Pandoc to convert this HTML file into TeX, I made some aesthetic edits (like replacing Roman numerals by Arabic ones and using Arabic numerals for footnote markers). All the source files and the resulting PDF compiled in TeX are hosted on this GitHub repository and updates will be pushed there.
It is my plan to produce two descendants of this book. The first is an illustrated (and hopefully thereby improved) student edition that includes black-and-white diagrams for the reader while retaining the instructor notes. This edition will also include excerpts from primary sources that Russell discusses in the text.
The second is a truer edition without my notes for the student or primary sources but with Russell’s index (with updated page numbers) and following the paragraph and sentence breaks in the 1967 edition published by Oxford University Press. This will also be a “truer” text of Problems than any other known to me.
This version of The Problems of Philosophy is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0). The work done to produce this book was generously supported by an Affordable Textbook Initiative Grant from Western Kentucky University’s Libraries. I thank the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, who hold the copyright to The Problems of Philosophy, for their permission to reproduce Russell’s terrific introduction to philosophy.
Disciplines
Epistemology | Ethics and Political Philosophy | Logic and Foundations of Mathematics | Metaphysics | Other Philosophy | Philosophy | Philosophy of Language
Recommended Repository Citation
Russell, Bertrand and Elkind, Landon D.C. Ed., "The Problems of Philosophy: Student Edition" (2026). Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications. Paper 66.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/phil_rel_fac_pub/66
Included in
Epistemology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Logic and Foundations of Mathematics Commons, Metaphysics Commons, Other Philosophy Commons, Philosophy of Language Commons