Book excerpt: Modern analytic philosophy was born around the turn of the century, largely through Bertrand Russell's and G.E. Moore's reaction against the neo-Hegelianism that dominated British philosophy in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It is well known that Russell had himself been a neo-Hegelian, but thus far little has been known about his work during that period. Drawing primarily on unpublished papers held in the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University, this is the first detailed study of this early period of Russell's philosophical career. Griffin examines Russell's philosophical education at Cambridge in the early 1890s and his conversion to neo-Hegelianism; his ambitious plans for a neo-Hegelian dialectic of the sciences; and the problems that ultimately led him to reject neo-Hegelianism.