The great three-volume Principia Mathematica is deservedly the most famous work ever written on the foundations of mathematics. Its aim is to deduce all the fundamental propositions of logic and mathematics from a small number of logical premisses and primitive ideas, and so to prove that mathematics is a development of logic. This abridged text of Volume I contains the material that is most relevant to an introductory study of logic and the philosophy of mathematics (more advanced students will wish to refer to the complete edition). It contains the whole of the preliminary sections (which present the authors' justification of the philosophical standpoint adopted at the outset of their work); the whole of Part 1 (in which the logical properties of propositions, propositional functions, classes and relations are established); section 6 of Part 2 (dealing with unit classes and couples); and Appendices A and B (which give further developments of the argument on the theory of deduction and truth functions).

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When The Concept of Nature by Alfred North Whitehead was first published in 1920 it was declared to be one of the most important works on the relation between philosophy and science for many years, and several generations later it continues to deserve careful attention. Whitehead explores the fundamental problems of substance, space and time, and offers a criticism of Einstein's method of interpreting results while developing his own well-known theory of the four-dimensional 'space-time manifold'. With a specially commissioned new preface written by Michael Hampe, this book is presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century for a new generation of readers.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was equally celebrated as a mathematician, a philosopher and a physicist. He collaborated with his former student Bertrand Russell on the first edition of Principia Mathematica (published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913), and after several years teaching and writing on physics and the philosophy of science at University College London and Imperial College, was invited to Harvard to teach philosophy and the theory of education. A Treatise on Universal Algebra was published in 1898, and was intended to be the first of two volumes, though the second (which was to cover quaternions, matrices and the general theory of linear algebras) was never published. This book discusses the general principles of the subject and covers the topics of the algebra of symbolic logic and of Grassmann's calculus of extension.

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