Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Of Bertrand Russell’s three score books, his History of Western Philosophy is perhaps the best known. A publishing sensation from the moment of its publication in America in October 1945 and in Britain a year later, the book remains in print 80 years on. Curiously, however, the History has received inadequate scholarly attention. In particular, what has not been seriously examined are the reasons for this remarkable and unexpected success—why this immensely long book, which few contemporaries and even fewer modern students have bothered to read cover to cover, came to sell tens of thousands of copies in paper-rationed Britain and America. This paper seeks to answer that question by examining in Part i the book’s genesis, sources, composition, purposes (both avowed and latent), and in Part ii its critical reception in both Britain and the us, and continued reputation among scholars and laymen alike. A tract for its desperately troubled times, it spoke to a world fearful of totalitarianism, starving for liberal rebirth, and yearning for reasons to believe in progress, optimism, and reason, A History ofWestern Philosophy , for all its flaws and inadequacies, provided a source of solace, understanding, and hope to its readers then and now.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".