A founder of modern analytic philosophy and one of the most important logicians of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell has influenced generations of philosophers. The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell explores this influence in detail and responds to renewed interest in Russell's philosophical approach, presenting the best guide to research in Russell studies today. Bringing new insights into Russell's relationship with his contemporaries, a team of experts explore his life-long battles with important philosophical issues. They consider how he influenced thinkers and schools of thought, from Schroeder, Frege and Meinong to Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, while also covering his impact on individual issues in epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and political philosophy. Importantly this companion discusses often overlooked topics. Focusing on Russell's later views, including his moral philosophy and his politics, reveals that Russell did make significant contributions to ethics - both theoretical and practical - in the course of his career. Through a combination of enlightening historical background and sustained focus on Russell's impact on contemporary areas of philosophy, The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell demonstrates why Russell continues to influence philosophers of language, mathematics, epistemology and metaphysics.

An Ironic Approach to the Absolute: Schlegel's Poetic Mysticism brings Friedrich Schlegel's ironic fragments in dialogue with the Dao De Jing and John Ashbery's Flow Chart to argue that poetic texts offer an intuition of the whole because they resist the reader's desire to comprehend them fully. Karolin Mirzakhan argues that although Schlegel's ironic fragments proclaim their incompleteness in both their form and their content, they are the primary means for facilitating an intuition of the Absolute. Focusing on the techniques by which texts remain open, empty, or ungraspable, Mirzakhan's analysis uncovers the methods that authors use to cultivate the agility of mind necessary for their readers to intuit the Absolute. Mirzakhan develops the term "poetic mysticism" to describe the experience of the Absolute made possible by particular textual moments,examining the Dao De Jing and Flow Chart to provide an original account of the striving to know the Absolute that is non-linear, non-totalizing, and attuned to non-presence. This conversation with ancient and contemporary poetic texts enacts the romantic imperative to join philosophy with poetry and advances a clearer communication of the notion of the Absolute that emerges from Schlegel's romantic philosophy.