ABSTRACT

From August 1914 until the end of 1917 I was wholly occupied with matters arising out of my opposition to the war, but by the beginning of 1918 I had become persuaded that there was no further pacifist work that I could usefully do. I wrote as quickly as I could a book, which I had contracted to produce, called Roads to Freedom, but when that was out of the way I began again to work at philosophical subjects. In prison, I wrote first a polemical criticism of Dewey and then the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. After this I found my thoughts turning to theory of knowledge and to those parts of psychology and of linguistics which seemed relevant to that subject. This was a more or less permanent change in my philosophical interests. The outcome, so far as my own thinking was concerned, is embodied in three books: The Analysis of Mind (1921); An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940); Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948).