Bertrand Russell Click to enlarge

• Born: 18 May 1872
• Birthplace: Trelleck, Wales
• Died: 2 February 1970
• Best Known As: Influential 20th century logician and philosopher

While teaching mathematics at Cambridge Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia Mathematica (1910-13), an ambitious attempt to prove that mathematics was grounded in logic. Russell's ideas led to the dominance of analytical logic on western philosophy in the 20th century. An active social reformer, he also wrote on politics, religion and education, and his vocal protests against World War I led to a brief jail sentence in 1918. Although he supported British aims in World War II, later in life Russell became an outspoken advocate of nuclear disarmament.

Russell's grandfather was a two-time Prime Minister...when his brother died in 1931, Russell became 3rd Earl of Russell...he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950...he was married four times and had a reputation as a ladies' man.

British philosopher and mathematician (1872–1970)

Russell, who was born at Trelleck, England, was orphaned at an early age and brought up in the home of his grandfather, the politician Lord John Russell. He was educated privately before attending Cambridge University (1890), from which he graduated (1893) in mathematics. In 1895 he became a fellow and lecturer at Cambridge. His work after 1920 was mainly devoted to the development of his philosophical and political opinions. He became well known for his popularization of many areas of philosophy and also, in works such as The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925), of the new trends in scientific thought. For his writings he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize for literature. He succeeded his brother to become the 3rd Earl Russell in 1931. Throughout much of his life Russell was an intense advocate of pacifism and during World War I he was imprisoned for expressing these views. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, he became a central figure in the movements criticizing the use of the atomic bomb, leading demonstrations and mass sit-downs and becoming president of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958.

At Cambridge Russell became interested in the relatively new discipline of mathematical logic in which he was to be a pioneer. With Guiseppe Peano he was one of the few to recognize the genius of Gottlob Frege and his new system of logic. In 1902 he wrote to Frege, presenting what is now known as Russell's paradox, and asking how Frege's system would deal with it. (Unfortunately, as Frege acknowledged, the system could not accommodate it.) The paradox is one of the paradoxes of set theory and rests on the (then ill-defined) notion of a set. Some sets are members of themselves (the set of all sets is an example because it is itself a set; the set of cats is not an example, as it is not itself a cat). Consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves: is it a member of itself? If it is, it is not and vice versa. To avoid such paradoxes Russell formulated his logical theory of types. In 1903 he began his collaboration with A. N. Whitehead on their ambitious, if not entirely successful, project of placing mathematics on a sound axiomatic footing by deriving it from logic. This culminated in the publication of Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), containing major advances in logic and the philosophy of mathematics.

The British mathematician, philosopher, and social reformer Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3d Earl Russell (1872-1970), made original and decisive contributions to logic and mathematics and wrote with distinction in all fields of philosophy.

Bertrand Russell was born at Ravenscroft, Monmouthshire, Wales, on May 18, 1872, into an aristocratic family with many distinguished and some eccentric members. By the time he was 4 years old, his parents were dead, and his paternal grandparents, overturning his parents' will specifying that the child be reared by two atheist friends, became his guardians. Russell's grandfather, Lord John Russell, twice prime minister to Queen Victoria, died 3 years later, and young Bertrand was left in the care of his grandmother, a lady of strict puritanical moral views who nevertheless gave him great affection and "that feeling of safety that children need."

Early Life and Education

Russell's early education was provided at home by tutors, and in retrospect he found his childhood a happy one. In adolescence, however, he experienced intense loneliness, relieved by "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love." His brother introduced him to the Elements of Euclid. "I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until [Alfred North] Whitehead and I finished Principia Mathematica, when I was 38, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness."

At Trinity College

When he was 18 years old, Russell entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Alfred North Whitehead was the first to sense Russell's extraordinary talent, and he quickly undertook to sponsor Russell among the Cambridge literati. In his second year at Cambridge Russell was elected to the Apostles, a weekly discussion group that since 1820 has included among its members many of the people of intellectual eminence at Cambridge. There he met and formed close friendships with, among others, G. Lowes Dickinson, G. E. Moore, and John McTaggart, and a little later with John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. Of his generation at Cambridge, Russell later wrote, "We believed in ordered progress by means of politics and free discussion."

After graduation Russell stayed on at Cambridge as a fellow of Trinity College and lecturer in philosophy. In 1916 he was dismissed because of a scandal over his conviction and fine for writing about the case of a conscientious objector in World War I. His association with Cambridge meant a great deal to Russell, and he was deeply wounded by its abrupt termination.

First Marriage and Mathematical Writings

In 1894, after overcoming the opposition of his family, Russell married an American girl, Alys Pearsall Smith. The first years of their marriage were largely spent traveling in Europe and in the United States, where Russell gave some lectures. From this period his first book, comprising a set of lectures on German socialism, and his fellowship dissertation, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, date. The latter work established Russell's reputation. The year 1900 was another turning point for Russell, for at the International Congress of Philosophy, he met Giuseppe Peano, the Italian mathematical theorist, and immediately saw the significance of Peano's work. Enormously stimulated, he began to rethink his own ideas about the fundamental notions of mathematics, and during the fall of 1900 he finished most of his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics. "Intellectually," he later wrote, "this was the highest point of my life."

A few years later Russell's views on mathematics deepened further, and he became "reluctantly convinced" that mathematics consists of tautologies. With Whitehead he undertook the enormous project of trying to show that mathematics - in particular, arithmetic, but in principle, all mathematics - was an extension of logic, that no underived concepts and no unproved assumptions need be introduced other than those of pure logic. The results were published as Principia Mathematica in three volumes (1910-1913). Russell and Whitehead each had to put up £50 toward publication costs. In spite of mistakes and later improvements, the work remains a landmark in the history of mathematics.

While serving a 6-month prison term in 1918 for writing an article about the British government and the American army that was judged libelous, Russell wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. But Russell's interest was deflected from these abstract topics by the "vast suffering" caused by World War I; in the face of this tragedy his earlier work now seemed to him "thin and rather trivial." Increasingly thereafter, Russell's work showed a marked reformist bent. Seldom, indeed, has a philosopher shown such a sense of social responsibility.

Theory of Knowledge and Metaphysics

Russell's views in epistemology and metaphysics, though influential, show less originality than his work on logic and on social questions. His views in these fields constitute, in effect, refinements or further developments in the tradition of British empiricism. Following a principle that he called the supreme maxim in scientific philosophy, "Wherever possible substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities," Russell argued that one's own private sense-data were the things most directly known. In Our Knowledge of the External World Russell tried to show that physical objects are logical constructions out of actual and possible sense-data. In his Analysis of Mind (1921) Russell went still further to argue that from sense-data, regarded as neutral elements, one can construct both mind and matter.

In his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, Russell offered provocative opinions about the ways truth claims can be assessed, and he outlined a set of principles for use in defending the validity of inductive reasoning.

Travel and Controversy

After World War I Russell visited China and the Soviet Union. Initially sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution, he quickly saw its threat to the value he prized above all others - liberty - and he wrote a book, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, that proved prophetic regarding the developing course of the Russian Revolution. Russell also stood three times for election to Parliament, each time unsuccessfully.

In 1927, with his second wife, Dora, Russell founded a progressive school at Beacon Hill. There he tested the educational theories propounded in his books Education Especially in Early Childhood and Education and the Social Order (1932).

In the late 1930s Russell lectured frequently in the United States, and in 1940 he was appointed to teach at the College of the City of New York. Immediately he was subjected to a barrage of criticism in the American press by clergymen and city officials. These worthies had been offended by Russell's advocacy, in Marriage and Morals (1929), of temporary marriages for college students. A New York Supreme Court judge voided Russell's appointment on the grounds that he was an alien and an advocate of sexual immorality.

In the wake of this scandal Russell was offered a lectureship by the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa. The lectures prepared for this position formed the basis of Russell's History of Western Philosophy (1945), perhaps his most widely circulated book. However, in 1943 Russell was summarily dismissed from his Barnes post under circumstances that enabled him to bring a successful suit for redress of grievances.

Radical Sage

In 1944 Russell returned to England and was reelected a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Honors began to pour in upon him. He was made an honorary fellow of the British Academy in 1949, and in the same year he received the Order of Merit. In 1950 Russell won the Nobel Prize for literature, being cited for "his many-sided and significant writings, in which he appeared as the champion of humanity and freedom of thought."

Russell had abandoned his pacifism at the outset of World War II, but immediately thereafter he resumed his activities in the peace movement. He led the "Ban the Bomb" fight in England, taking part in a sit-down demonstration at the age of 89, for which he served a 7-day jail sentence. Russell tried to intervene in the Cuban missile crisis, and he vigorously opposed American involvement in Vietnam.

Russell was an essentially shy man, yet brilliant and witty in conversation. He had a remarkable capacity for friendship. Though unhappy in his first three marriages, he finally found, late in life, "ecstasy and peace" in his fourth marriage, to Edith Finch in 1952. Although frail in appearance, he was vigorous and active throughout most of his life, embroiled in social and political controversies to the very end. He died at Penrhyndendraeth, Wales, on Feb. 2, 1970.

Further Reading

Perhaps the most useful introduction to Russell's work is his Basic Writings, 1903-1959, edited by Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Dennon (1961), and his My Philosophical Development (1959). The most interesting accounts of his life are by Russell himself: a half-dozen earlier autobiographical essays were crowned by his The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (3 vols., 1967-1969). Biographies include Alan T. Wood, Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Sceptic (1957), and Herbert Gottschalk, Bertrand Russell: A Life (1965). Russell published a great deal, and critical commentary on his work is considerable. An excellent bibliography is in Paul Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1944; rev. ed., 2 vols., 1963), which also includes a large number of critical essays by eminent authors together with Russell's replies.

(1872-1970) English philosopher and political activist. Russell's main philosophical achievements are in the areas of logic and mathematics. Nevertheless, he became the best-known philosopher of his time because of the volume and clarity of his writing, and the vigour and prominence of his political activism.

If anybody could be said to be born to Liberalism, Russell could. His grandfather was Lord John Russell, a former Liberal Prime Minister; and his secular ‘godfather’ (a non-Christian appointed by Russell's non-Christian parents) was John Stuart Mill. Many of Russell's political causes (such as support for female suffrage and opposition to the First World War) may be regarded as classically liberal; and so, in a sense, may his leading role in CND in the early 1960s and even his fierce opposition to the American involvement in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Russell was not a lifelong pacifist; for a short period after the Second World War he believed that, rather than allow the Soviet Union to acquire nuclear weapons which could lead to a war in which human life was wiped out or almost so, the United States and its allies should be prepared to go to war, atomic war if need be, against the Soviet Union. As Alan Ryan put it in Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (1988), ‘Russell was not a pacifist, because he was a consequentialist’. This does not debar him from being viewed as the last Victorian Liberal.

For more information on Bertrand (Arthur William) Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, visit Britannica.com.

Russell, Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970). In his long and complex life, Russell took many roles. After a distinguished mathematics and philosophy course at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was elected to a fellowship. His major early work was Principles of Mathematics, written by 1910 but not published until 1930. During the First World War Russell's pacifist activities resulted in the loss of his fellowship. In the inter-war years he lectured and wrote copiously, and was increasingly tempted to set up as sage. In 1938 he took an academic post in America and stayed there for most of the Second World War. His History of Western Philosophy (1945)sold well and removed his financial troubles. He was given the OM (1949) and the Nobel prize for literature (1950). From 1954 onwards he took a prominent part in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. His judgement became foolish and he declared that Harold Macmillan was worse than Hitler.

Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872-1970) English philosopher. Russell was born into the liberal and aristocratic family descended from the Prime Minister, John Russell, and educated first at home, and then from 1890 at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics. From an early age, and especially after meeting the mathematician G. Peano (1848-1932) in 1900, his interests were devoted to the foundations of mathematics. The Principles of Mathematics was published in 1902, a year after the discovery of Russell's paradox. After a period spent wrestling with the problem, Russell propounded the theory of definite descriptions and the theory of types, which were central elements in his own solution. From 1907 to 1910 he worked in collaboration with Whitehead for ten to twelve hours a day for eight months of the year on Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes, 1910-13. During this period he also laid the foundations of his life as a radical, active, liberal intellectual, beginning by standing as a suffragist candidate for Parliament. During the First World War he was imprisoned for six months for publishing the statement that American soldiers would be employed as strike-breakers in Britain, ‘an occupation to which they were accustomed when in their own country’.

After the war, Russell visited Russia and lived for a period in China. During the 1920s his principal philosophical works included The Analysis of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927), although he also published a large number of popular and semi-popular works on social and moral issues. He opened and ran a school, but from 1938 to 1944 taught at a number of American universities, including Chicago and the university of California at Los Angeles. He was however denied employment by the City College of New York, on the grounds that he was morally unsuitable. In a famous ensuing law-suit his works were described as ‘lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrowminded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber’. During the Second World War he wrote the History of Western Philosophy (1945). Human Knowledge's Scope and Limits (1948) is Russell's last important philosophical book, but by this time he was a world-famous symbol of philosophy and its radical potential. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, and as the unmistakable patriarch of the liberal academic world spent the rest of his life actively campaigning for nuclear disarmament.

Russell's philosophy is generally felt to have reached its peak in the first two decades of the 20th century. The seminal work on the foundations of mathematics is accompanied by lucid work on truth and its basis in experience; the theory of definite descriptions provided the logical background to an epistemology based on the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, although the restricted role that Russell allows to acquaintance is generally thought to be problematic. By the time of Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), Russell was convinced that scientific philosophy required analysing many objects of belief as ‘logical constructions’ or ‘logical fictions’, and the programme of analysis that this inaugurated dominated the subsequent philosophy of logical atomism, and then the work of Carnap and the logical positivists. In The Analysis of Mind, the mind itself is treated, in a fashion reminiscent of Hume, as no more than the collection of neutral perceptions or sense data that make up the flux of conscious experience, and that looked at another way also make up the external world (neutral monism). In his early period Russell is content with extending his realism to universals, but An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) represents a more empiricist approach to the problem.

In his general philosophical approach Russell was not only a realist, but also, perhaps in continued opposition to the monolithic nature of absolute idealism, a pluralist and foundationalist, intent upon bringing the resources of modern logic to a basic empiricism. He had little sympathy with any movement away from those ideas, as, for instance, it developed from the later work of Wittgenstein. Russell was a gifted raconteur, and as well as his many philosophical works wrote an entertaining three-volume Autobiography (1967-9).

Earl, 1872–1970, British philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer, b. Trelleck, Wales.

Life

The Early Years

Russell had a distinguished background: His grandfather Lord John Russell introduced the Reform Bill of 1832 and was twice prime minister; his parents were both prominent freethinkers; and his informal godfather was John Stuart Mill. Orphaned as a small child, Russell was reared by his paternal grandmother under stern puritanic rule. That experience powerfully affected his thinking on matters of morality and education. Russell studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (1890–94), where later he was a fellow (1895–1901) and a lecturer (1910–16). It was during this time that he published his most important works in philosophy and mathematics, The Principles of Mathematics (1903) and, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (3 vol., 1910–13), and also had as his student Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The Middle Years

World War I had a crucial effect on Russell: until that time he had thought of himself as a philosopher and mathematician. Although he had already embraced pacifism, it was in reaction to the war that he became passionately concerned with social issues. His active pacifism at the time of the war inspired public resentment, caused him to be dismissed from Cambridge, attacked by former associates, and fined by the government (which confiscated and sold his library when he refused to pay), and led finally to a six-month imprisonment in 1918. From 1916 until the late 1930s, Russell held no academic position and supported himself mainly by writing and by public lecturing. In 1927 he and his wife, Dora, founded the experimental Beacon Hill School, which influenced the development of other schools in Britain and America.

He succeeded to the earldom in 1931 and in 1938 began teaching in the United States, first at the Univ. of Chicago and then at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles. In 1941 he went to teach at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., after his appointment to the College of the City of New York was canceled as a result of a celebrated legal battle occasioned by protest against his liberal views, particularly those on sex. These views, much distorted by his critics, had appeared in Marriage and Morals (1929), where he took liberal positions on divorce, adultery, and homosexuality. In 1944 he was restored to a fellowship at Cambridge. In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Later Years

Prior to World War II, in the face of the Nazi threat, Russell abandoned his pacifist stance; but after the war he again became a leading spokesman for pacifism and especially for the unilateral renunciation (by Great Britain) of atomic weapons. In 1961 his activity in mass demonstrations to ban nuclear weapons led once more to his imprisonment. He organized, but was unable to attend, what was called the war crimes tribunal, held in Stockholm in 1967, presided over by Jean-Paul Sartre, and directed against U.S. activities in Vietnam. Almost until his death he was active in social reform.

Philosopher and Mathematician

Throughout his life his dissent had scorned easy popularity with either the right or the left. Untamable, he had profound trust in the ultimate power of rationality, which he voiced with an undogmatic but quenchless zeal. Philosophically and ethically Russell's thought grew in reaction against the extremes he encountered. He answered the idealism of F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart with a logical atomism founded on a rigorous empirical base: he was deeply convinced of the logical independence of individual facts and the dependence of knowledge on the data of original experience. His emphasis on logical analysis influenced the course of British philosophy in the 20th cent.

One of his most important notions was that of the logical construct, the realization that an object normally thought of as a unity was actually constructed from various, discrete, simpler empirical observations. The technique of logical constructionism was first employed in his mathematical theory. Under the influence of the symbolic logic of Giuseppe Peano, Russell tried to show that mathematics could be explained by the rules of formal logic. His demonstration involved showing that mathematical entities could be “constructed” from the less problematic entities of logic. Later he applied the technique to concepts such as physical objects and the mind.

Although he came to have misgivings about logical atomism and never assented to all the propositions of empiricism, he never ceased trying to base his thought—mathematical, philosophical, or ethical—not on vague principle but on actual experience. This can be seen in his pacifism as well as in his philosophy: he objected to specific wars in specific circumstances. So, in the circumstances preceding World War II he could abandon pacifism and, following the war, resume it.

Similarly, in ethics he described himself as a relativist. Good and evil he saw to be resolvable in (or constructed from) individual desires. He did distinguish, however, between what he called “personal” and “impersonal” desires, those founded mainly on self-interest and those formed regardless of self-interest. He admitted difficulties with this ethical stance, as well as with his logical atomism. As much as anything, his thought was characterized by a pervasive skepticism, toward his own thought as well as that of others.

Social Reformer

As with his philosophical stance, Russell's positions on social issues developed as a reaction against extremes in his own experience. He believed that cruelty and an admiration for violence grew from inward or outward defects that were largely an outcome of what happened to people when they were very young. Pacifism could not be effected politically; a peaceful and happy world could not be achieved without deep changes in education. “I believe that nine out of ten who have had a conventional upbringing in their early years have become in some degree incapable of a decent and sane attitude toward marriage and sex generally.”

His objections to religion were similarly based. What he tried to draw attention to was the destructiveness of accepting propositions on faith—in the absence of, or even in opposition to, evidence. “The important thing is not what you believe, but how you believe it.” The person who bases his belief on reason will support it by argument and be ready to abandon the position if the argument fails. Belief based on faith concludes that argument is useless and resorts to “force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young whenever [it] has the power to control their education.”

If Russell's logic was not always unassailable, his life showed that ethical relativism could be combined with a passionate social conscience, and that passionate commitment could be stated without dogmatism. In his autobiography (3 vol., 1967–69) Russell summarized his personal philosophy by saying, “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”

Bibliography

See American Civil Liberties Union, The Story of the Bertrand Russell Case (1941); J. Dewey and H. M. Kallen, ed., The Bertrand Russell Case (1941, repr. 1972); D. F. Pears, Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy (1967); E. D. Klemke, ed., Essays on Bertrand Russell (1970); J. Watling, Bertrand Russell (1970); A. J. Ayer, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971) and Bertrand Russell (1972); R. Jager, The Development of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy (1972); R. Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solititude, 1872–1921 (1996) and Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness, 1921–1970 (2001).

Quotes:

"All human activity is prompted by desire."

"Most people would rather die than think: many do."

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

"Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man."

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."

See more famous quotes by Bertrand Russell