BOOKS ON PHILOSOPHY AT
ASH RARE BOOKS
43 HURON ROAD
LONDON SW17 8RE
UNITED KINGDOM

London : George Allen & Unwin, (1946). First British edition. A fluent, witty, elegant, and sweeping survey of the philosophic tradition, treated as much as social and cultural history as in terms of pure philosophy – the Pre-Socratics; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; the Cynics, Sceptics, Stoics, and Epicureans; Jewish, Mohammedan, and Catholic scholars; and the modern tradition – Machiavelli, Erasmus and More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Bergson, William James, Dewey, etc. “I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But, to my mind, a man without bias cannot write interesting history – if, indeed, such a man exists” (Bertrand Russell).
Demy 8vo (23cm). 916pp. Original canvas, blocked in brown and lettered in yellow; a very good copy in the A. E. Barlow dust-jacket (printed on the verso of a war-surplus map of the English East Coast) – the jacket lightly repaired and slightly chipped at head and tail, with a further shallow chip at the top of the front panel, but otherwise very good.

£250

To purchase, call us or e-mail us at books@ashrare.com quoting stock number 43686 – or simply click on the button

London : William Pickering, 1847. First Pickering edition. “The not distinguishing where things should be distinguished, and the not confounding, where things should be confounded, is the cause of all the mistakes in the world” and other majestic thinking from the “glory of the English nation”, the jurist and scholar John Selden. Collections of Selden’s table-talk had appeared since the seventeenth century, but are here introduced by a long “biographical preface” from Samuel Weller Singer (1783-1858) – “There are few volumes of its size so pregnant with sense, combined with the most profound learning; it is impossible to open it without finding some important fact ... something practically useful and applicable to the business of life”. Printed by Charles Whittingham at Chiswick.
Foolscap 8vo (164 x 100mm). cxxxiv,[2],(258)pp. Portrait frontispiece. Bound in an elegant later (mid twentieth-century) half tan crushed morocco; all edges gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; just a hint of sunning, a few faint spots to binder’s blanks, but overall a very good, sound and clean copy. Dated 1957 ownership inscription of David Fyfe Anderson (1904-1988), the Scottish obstetrician.

£125

Currently on display at Bryars & Bryars in central London, please enquire about availability – books@ashrare.com

Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1953. First edition. Parallel German and English texts of perhaps the most important work of philosophy of the twentieth century and a turning point in the study of language, meaning and semantics. “The most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived” (Bertrand Russell). Although the bulk of the work had been ready for publication some years earlier, it was completed from the manuscripts, edited and published posthumously by Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) – also responsible for the translation – and Rush Rhees (1905-1989).
Demy 8vo (219 x 139mm). x,vie-xe,232,232e,[i]pp – German (verso) and English (recto) text numbered in duplicate. Errata slip. Bound in a handsome recent half blue morocco, banded and gilt; burgundy label; a very good copy indeed, clean, sound and attractively bound.

SOLD