Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell 
(May 18, 1872 - February 2, 1970) was one of the most influential 
mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians of the modern age, 
working mostly in the 20th century. A prolific writer, Russell 
was also a populariser of philosophy and a commentator on a large 
variety of topics, ranging from very serious issues to the mostly 
mundane. Russell's elegant prose, clarity of expression, and 
biting wit were widely admired. Continuing a family tradition 
in political affairs, he was an influential liberal activist 
for most of his long life. Millions looked up to Russell as a 
prophet of the creative and rational life; at the same time, 
his stances on many topics were extremely controversial. Born 
at the height of Britain's economic and political ascendancy, 
he died of influenza nearly a century later when Britain's 
empire had all but vanished, and her power had dissipated in 
two victorious, but debilitating world wars. As one of the 
world's most well-known intellectuals, Russell's voice carried 
enormous moral authority, even into his late nineties. Among 
his other political activities, Russell was an influential 
proponent of nuclear disarmament and an outspoken critic of 
the American war in Vietnam.

In 1950, Russell was made Nobel Laureate in Literature "in 
recognition of his varied and significant writings in which 
he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".

Russell's work on philosophy, logic, and other subjects


Analytic(al) philosophy

Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of 
analytic philosophy, indeed, even of its several branches. 
At the beginning of the 20th Century, alongside G. E. Moore, 
Russell was largely responsible for the British "revolt 
against Idealism", a philosophy greatly influenced by Georg 
Hegel and his British apostle, F. H. Bradley. This revolt 
was echoed thirty years later in Vienna by the logical 
positivists' "revolt against metaphysics". Russell was 
particularly appalled by the idealist doctrine of internal 
relations, which held that in order to know any particular 
thing, we must know all of its relations. Russell showed 
that this would make space, time, science and the concept 
of number unintelligible. Russell's logical work with 
Whitehead continued this project.

Russell and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as 
meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy, and 
they sought clarity and precision in argument by the use 
of exact language and by breaking down philosophical 
propositions into their simplest components. Russell, 
in particular, saw logic and science as the principal 
tools of the philosopher. Indeed, unlike most philosophers 
who preceded him and his early contemporaries, Russell did 
not believe there was a separate method for philosophy. He 
believed that the main task of the philosopher was to 
illuminate the most general propositions about the world 
and to eliminate confusion. In particular, he wanted to 
end what he saw as the excesses of metaphysics. Russell 
adopted William of Occam's principle against multiplying 
unnecessary entities, Occam's Razor, as a central part of 
the method of analysis.


Epistemology

Russell's epistemology went through many phases. Once he 
shed Hegelianism in his early years, Russell remained a 
philosophical realist for the remainder of his life, 
believing that our direct experiences have primacy in 
the acquisition of knowledge. While some of his views 
have lost favor, his influence lingers on in the distinction 
between two ways in which we can be familiar with objects: 
"knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description." 
For a time, Russell thought that we could only be 
acquainted with our own sense data, momentary perceptions 
of colours, sounds, and the like, and that everything else, 
including the physical objects that these were sense data 
of, could only be reasoned to--known by description--and 
not known directly. This distinction has gained much 
wider application, though Russell eventually rejected 
the idea of an intermediate sense datum.

In his later philosophy, Russell subscribed to a kind of 
neutral monism, maintaining that the distinctions between 
the material and mental worlds, in the final analysis, 
were arbitrary, and that both can be reduced to a neutral 
property, a view similar to one held by the American 
philosopher, William James, and one that was first 
formulated by Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly 
admired. Instead of James' "pure experience," however, 
Russell characterized the stuff of our initial states of 
perception as "events."


Ethics

While Russell wrote a great deal on ethical subject matters, 
he did not believe that the subject belonged to philosophy 
or that when he wrote on ethics that he did so in his capacity 
as a philosopher. In his earlier years, Russell was greatly 
influenced by G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Along with 
Moore, he then believed that moral facts were objective, but 
only known through intuition, and that they were simple 
properties of objects, not equivalent (e.g., pleasure is 
good) to the natural objects to which they are often 
ascribed (see Naturalistic fallacy), and that these simple, 
undefinable moral properties cannot be analyzed using the 
non-moral properties with which they are associated. In time, 
however, he came to agree with his philosophical hero, David 
Hume, who believed that ethical terms dealt with subjective 
values that cannot be verified in the same way that matters 
of fact are. Coupled with Russell's other doctrines, this 
influenced the logical positivists, who formulated the 
theory of emotivism, which states that ethical propositions 
(along with those of metaphysics) were essentially 
meaningless and nonsensical or, at best, little more than 
expressions of attitudes and preferences. Notwithstanding 
his influence on them, Russell himself did not construe 
ethical propositions as narrowly as the positivists, for he 
believed that ethical considerations are not only meaningful, 
but that they are a vital subject matter for civil discourse. 
Indeed, though Russell was often characterized as the patron 
saint of rationality, he agreed with Hume, who said that 
reason ought to be subordinate to ethical considerations.


Logical atomisim

Perhaps Russell's most systematic, metaphysical treatment 
of philosophical analysis and his empiricist-centric 
logicism is evident in what he called Logical atomism, 
which is explicated in a set of lectures, "The Philosophy 
of Logical Atomism," which he gave in 1918. In these 
lectures, Russell sets forth his concept of an ideal, 
isomorphic language, one that would mirror the world, 
whereby our knowledge can be reduced to terms of atomic 
propositions and their truth-functional compounds. Logical 
atomism is a form of radical empiricism, for Russell 
believed the most important requirement for such an ideal 
language is that every meaningful proposition must consist 
of terms referring directly to the objects with which we 
are acquainted, or that they are defined by other terms 
referring to objects with which we are acquainted. Russell 
excluded certain formal, logical terms such as all, the, 
is, and so forth, from his isomorphic requirement, but he 
was never entirely satisfied about our understanding of 
such terms. One of the central themes of Russell's atomism 
is that the world consists of logically independent facts, 
a plurality of facts, and that our knowledge depends on the 
data of our direct experience of them. In his later life, 
Russell came to doubt aspects of logical atomism, especially 
his principle of isomorphism, though he continued to believe 
that the process of philosophy ought to consist of breaking 
things down into their simplest components, even though we 
might not ever fully arrive at an ultimate atomic fact.


Logic and mathematics

Russell was without peer in his contributions to modern 
mathematical logic. The American logician, Willard Quine, 
said Russell's work represented the greatest influence on 
his own work. While subsequent systems have improved upon 
Russell's work in several areas (though certainly not all), 
modern logic rests largely on Russell's foundational work in 
the early part of the 20th Century.

Russell's first mathematical work, An Essay on the Foundations 
of Geometry, was published in 1897. This work was heavily 
influenced by Immanuel Kant. Russell soon realized that the 
conception it laid out would have made Albert Einstein's schema 
of space-time impossible, which he understood to be superior 
to his own system. Thenceforth, he rejected the entire Kantian 
program as it related to mathematics and geometry, and he 
maintained that his own earliest work on the subject was 
nearly without value.

Interested in the definition of number, Russell studied the 
work of George Boole, Georg Cantor, and Augustus de Morgan, 
and he became convinced that the foundations of mathematics 
were tied to logic. In 1900 he attended a philosophical 
congress in Paris where he became familiar with the work of 
the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano. He mastered Peano's 
new symbolism and his set of axioms for arithmetic. Peano was 
able to define logically all of the terms of these axioms with 
the exception of 0, number, successor, and the singular term, 
the. Russell took it upon himself to find logical definitions 
for each of these. He eventually discovered that Gottlob Frege 
had independently arrived at equivalent definitions for 0, 
successor, and number, and the definition of number is now 
usually referred to as the Frege-Russell definition. It was 
largely Russell who brought Frege to the attention of the 
English-speaking world.

In 1903, Russell published The Principles of Mathematics, in 
which the concept of class is inextricably tied to the 
definition of number. In writing Principles, Russell came 
across Cantor's proof that there was no greatest cardinal 
number, which Russell believed was mistaken. This caused 
him to analyze classes, for it was known that given any 
number of elements, the number of classes they result in 
is greater than their number. In turn, this led to the discovery 
of a very interesting class, namely, the class of all classes, 
which consists of two kinds of classes: classes that are members 
of themselves, and classes that are not members of themselves, 
which led him to find that the so-called principle of extentionality, 
taken for granted by logicians of the time, was fatally flawed, 
and that it resulted in a contradiction, whereby Y is a member 
of Y, if and only if, Y is not a member of Y. This has become 
known as Russell's Paradox, the solution to which he outlined 
in an appendix to Principles, and which he later developed into 
a complete theory, the Theory of types. Aside from exposing a 
major inconsistency in naive set theory, Russell's work led 
directly to the creation of modern axiomatic set theory. It 
also crippled Frege's project of reducing arithmetic to logic. 
The Theory of Types and much of Russell's subsequent work have 
also found practical applications with computer science and 
information technology.

Russell continued to defend logicism, the view that mathematics 
is in some important sense reducible to logic, and along with 
his former teacher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the monumental 
Principia Mathematica, an axiomatic system on which all of 
mathematics can be built. The first volume of the Principia 
was published in 1910, which is largely ascribed to Russell. 
More than any other single work, it established the specialty 
of mathematical or symbolic logic. Two more volumes were 
published, but their original plan to incorporate geometry 
in a fourth volume was never realized, and Russell never felt 
up to improving the original works, though he referenced new 
developments and problems in his preface to the second edition. 
Upon completing the Principia, three volumes of extraordinarily 
abstract and complex reasoning, Russell was exhausted, and he 
never felt his intellectual faculties fully recovered from the 
effort. Although the Principia did not fall prey to the 
paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by Kurt 
Gödel that—for exactly that reason—neither Principia 
Mathematica nor any other consistent logical system could 
prove all mathematical truths; hence, Russell's project 
was necessarily incomplete.

Russell's last significant work in mathematics and logic, 
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, was written, 
actually, dictated to a secretary, while he was in jail for 
his anti-war activities during World War I. This was 
largely an explication of his previous work and its 
philosophical significance.


Philosophy of language

Russell was not the first philosopher to suggest that language 
had an important bearing on how we understand the world; 
however, more than anyone before him, Russell made language, 
or more specifically, how we use language, a central part of 
philosophy. Had there been no Russell, it seems unlikely that 
philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, J. L. 
Austin, and P. F. Strawson, among others, would have embarked 
upon the same course, for so much of what they did was to amplify 
or respond, sometimes critically, to what Russell had said before 
them, using many of the techniques that he originally developed. 
Russell, along with Moore, shared the idea that clarity of 
expression is a virtue, a notion that has been a touchstone for 
philosophers ever since, particularly among those who deal with 
the philosophy of language.

Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to philosophy of 
language is his theory of descriptions, as presented in his seminal 
essay, On Denoting, first published in 1905, which the mathematician 
and philosopher Frank Ramsey described as "a paradigm of 
philosophy." The theory is normally illustrated using the 
phrase "the present King of France", as in "The present king of 
France is bald." What object is this proposition about, given that 
there is not, at present, a king of France? Alexius Meinong had 
suggested that we must posit a realm of "nonexistent entities" that 
we can suppose we are referring to when we use expressions such as 
this; but this would be a strange theory, to say the least. Frege 
seemed to think we could dismiss as nonsense any proposition whose 
words apparently referred to objects that didn't exist. Among 
other things, the problem with this solution is that some such 
propositions, such as "If the present king of France is bald, 
then the present king of France has no hair on his head," not 
only do not seem nonsensical but appear to be obviously true. 
Roughly the same problem would arise if there were two kings 
of France at present: which of them does "the king of France" 
denote?

The problem is general to what are called "definite 
descriptions." Normally this includes all terms beginning 
with "the", and sometimes includes names, like "Walter 
Scott." (This point is quite contentious: Russell sometimes 
thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called names at 
all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much 
subsequent work has treated them as altogether different 
things.) What is the "logical form" of definite descriptions: 
how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them in order to 
show how the truth of the whole depends on the truths of the 
parts? Definite descriptions appear to be like names that by 
their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more or 
less. What, then, are we to say about the proposition as a 
whole if one of its parts apparently isn't working right?

Russell's solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term 
alone but the entire proposition that contained a definite 
description. "The present king of France is bald," he then 
suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x 
is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a 
present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that 
each definite description in fact contains a claim of 
existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, 
but these can be broken apart and treated separately from 
the predication that is the obvious content of the proposition. 
The proposition as a whole then says three things about some 
object: the definite description contains two of them, and 
the rest of the sentence contains the other. If the object does 
not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence 
turns out to be false, not meaningless.

One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due 
originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not 
claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that 
it does.

Wittgenstein, Russell's student, later achieved even greater 
prominence in the philosophy of language. Russell thought 
Wittgenstein's elevation of language as the only reality with 
which philosophy need be concerned was absurd, and he decried 
his influence and the influence of his followers, especially 
members of the so-called Oxford school, who he believed were 
promoting a kind of mysticism. Russell's belief that there is 
more to philosophy and knowing the world than simply 
understanding how we use language has regained prominence in 
philosophy and eclipsed Wittgenstein's language-centric views.


Philosophy of science

Russell frequently claimed that he was more convinced of his 
method of doing philosophy, the method of analysis, than of 
his philosophical conclusions. Science, of course, was one of 
the principal components of analysis, along with logic and 
mathematics. While Russell was a believer in the scientific 
method, knowledge derived from empirical research that is 
verified through repeated testing, he believed that science 
reaches only tentative answers, and that scientific progress 
is piecemeal, and attempts to find organic unities were largely 
futile. Indeed, he believed the same was true of philosophy. 
Another founder of modern philosophy of science, Ernst Mach, 
placed less reliance on method, per se, for he believed that 
any method that produced predictable results was satisfactory 
and that the principal role of the scientist was to make successful 
predictions. While Russell would doubtless agree with this as a 
practical matter, he believed that the ultimate objective of both 
science and philosophy was to understand reality, not simply to 
make predictions.

The fact that Russell made science a central part of his method 
and of philosophy was instrumental in making the philosophy of 
science a full-blooded, separate branch of philosophy and an area 
in which subsequent philosophers specialized. Much of Russell's 
thinking about science is exposed in his 1914 book, Our Knowledge 
of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in 
Philosophy. Among the several schools that were influenced by 
Russell were the logical positivists, particularly Rudolph 
Carnap, who maintained that the distinguishing feature of 
scientific propositions was their verifiability. This contrasted 
with the theory of Karl Popper, also greatly influenced by Russell, 
who believed that their importance rested in the fact that they 
were potentially falsifiable.

It is worth noting that outside of his strictly philosophical 
pursuits, Russell was always fascinated by science, particularly 
of physics, and he even authored several popular science books, 
The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925).
[edit]

Religion and theology

Russell's ethical outlook and his personal courage in facing 
controversies were certainly informed by his religious 
upbringing, principally by his paternal grandmother, who 
instructed him with the Biblical injunction, "Thou shalt not 
follow a multitude to do evil" (Exodus 23:2), something he 
said influenced him throughout his life.

For most of his adult life, however, Russell thought it very 
unlikely that there was a God, and he maintained that religion 
is little more than superstition and, despite any positive 
effects that religion might have, it is largely harmful to 
people. He believed religion and the religious outlook (he 
considered communism and other systematic ideologies to be 
species of religion) serve to impede knowledge, foster fear 
and dependency, and are responsible for much of the war, 
oppression, and misery that have beset the world. Technically, 
Russell was an agnostic, though he leaned towards atheism.

As a young man, Russell had a decidedly religious bent, himself, 
as is evident in his early Platonism. He longed for eternal 
truths, as he makes clear in his famous essay, A Free Man's 
Worship, widely regarded as a masterpiece in prose, but one 
that Russell came to dislike. While he rejected the supernatural, 
he freely admitted that he yearned for a deeper meaning to life.

Russell's views on religion can be found in his popular book, 
Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and 
Related Subjects (ISBN 0671203231), which began as a talk 
given March 6, 1927 at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices 
of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, 
England. The speech was published later that year as a 
pamphlet, which, along with other essays, was eventually 
published as a book. In the book, Russell considers a number 
of logical arguments for the existence of God, including the 
first cause argument, the natural-law argument, the argument 
from design, and moral arguments. He also goes into specifics 
about Christian theology.

His final conclusion:

    Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. 
    It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I 
    have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder 
    brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and 
    disputes. ... A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, 
    and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after 
    the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the 
    words uttered long ago by ignorant men.



Influence on philosophy

It would be difficult to overstate Russell's influence on 
modern philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world. 
While others were also influential, notably, Frege, Moore, and 
Wittgenstein, more than any other person, Russell made analysis 
the dominant approach to philosophy. Moreover, he is the founder 
or, at the very least, the prime mover of its major branches and
 themes, including several versions of the philosophy of language, 
 formal logical analysis, and the philosophy of science. The 
 various analytic movements throughout the last century all owe 
 something to Russell's earlier works.

Russell's influence on individual philosophers is singular, and 
perhaps most notably in the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was 
his student between 1911 and 1914. It should also be observed 
that Wittgenstein exerted considerable influence on Russell, 
especially in leading him to conclude, much to his regret, that 
mathematical truths were trivial, tautological truths. Evidence 
of Russell's influence on Wittegenstein can be seen throughout 
the Tractatus, which Russell was responsible for having published. 
Russell also helped to secure Wittgenstein's doctorate and a 
faculty position at Cambridge, along with several fellowships 
along the way. However, as previously stated, he came to disagree 
with Wittgenstein's later approach to philosophy, while 
Wittgenstein came to think of Russell as "superficial and glib," 
particularly in his popular writings. Russell's influence is also 
evident in the work of A. J. Ayer, Rudolph Carnap, Kurt Gödel, 
Karl Popper, W. V. Quine, and a number of other philosophers 
and logicians.

Some see Russell's influence as mostly negative, primarily 
those who have been critical of Russell's emphasis on science 
and logic, the consequent diminishment of metaphysics, and of 
his insistence that ethics lies outside of philosophy. Russell's 
admirers and detractors are often more acquainted with his 
pronouncements on social and political matters, or what some 
(e.g., Ray Monk) have called his "journalism," than they are with 
his technical, philosophical work. Among non-philosophers, there 
is a marked tendency to conflate these matters, and to judge 
Russell the philosopher on what he himself would certainly 
consider to be his non-philosophical opinions. Russell often 
cautioned people to make this distinction.

Russell left a large assortment of writing. Since adolescence, 
Russell wrote about 3,000 words a day, in long hand, with 
relatively few corrections; his first draft nearly always was 
his last draft, even on the most complex, technical matters. 
His previously unpublished work is an immense treasure trove, 
and scholars are continuing to gain new insights into Russell's 
thought.


Russell's activism

Political and social activism occupied much of Russell's time 
for most of his long life, which makes his prodigious and 
seminal writing on a wide range of technical and non-technical 
subjects all the more remarkable.

As a young man, Russell was a member of the Liberal Party and 
wrote in favor of free trade and women's suffrage. In his 1910 
pamphlet, Anti-Suffragist Anxieties, Russell wrote that some 
men opposed suffrage because they "fear that their liberty to 
act in ways that are injurious to women will be curtailed." In 
1907 he was nominated by the National Union of Suffrage 
Societies to run for Parliament in a by-election, which he 
lost by a wide margin.

While never a complete pacifist, Russell opposed British 
participation in World War I and, as a result, he was first 
fined, then lost his professorship at Trinity College, 
Cambridge, and was later imprisoned for six months. Russell 
called his stance "Relative Pacifism"— he held that war was 
always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme 
circumstances (such as when Adolf Hitler threatened to take 
over Europe) it might be a lesser of multiple evils. In the 
years leading to World War II, he supported the policy of 
appeasement; but by 1941 he acknowledged that in order to 
preserve democracy, Hitler had to be defeated.

Russell visited the Soviet Union and met Lenin in 1920. In a 
tract, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism 
(http://ia105612.us.archive.org/0/texts/ThePracticeAndTheoryOfBolshevism/TXT/), 
he wrote "Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration 
of all the progressive part of mankind". The tract was 
reissued in a censored form in 1949. He was unimpressed with 
the result of the communist revolution, and said he was 
"infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere -- stifled by its 
utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the 
life of impulse." He believed Lenin to be similar to a 
religious zealot, cold and possessed of "no love of liberty."

Politically, Russell envisioned a kind of benevolent, 
democratic socialism, not unlike the conception promoted by 
the Fabian Society. He was extremely critical of the 
totalitarianism exhibited by Stalin's regime, and of Marxism and 
communism, generally.

Russell wrote against Victorian notions of morality. His early 
writings expressed his opinion that sex between a man and woman 
who are not married to each other is not necessarily immoral if 
they truly love one another. This might not seem extreme by 
today's standards, but it was enough to raise vigorous protests 
and denunciations against him during his first visit to the 
United States. Russell's private life was even more 
unconventional and freewheeling than his published writings 
revealed, but that was not yet well known at the time. For 
example, philosopher Sidney Hook reports that Russell often 
spoke of his sexual prowess and of his various conquests.

On November 20, 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, 
addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, 
Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive 
nuclear strike on the Soviet Union is justified. Russell argued 
that war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed 
inevitable, so it would be a humanitarian gesture to get it 
over with quickly and have the United States in the dominant 
position. Currently, Russell argued, humanity could survive 
such a war, whereas a full nuclear war after both sides had 
manufactured large stockpiles of more destructive weapons was 
likely to result in the extinction of the human race. Russell 
later relented from this stance, instead arguing for mutual 
disarmament by the nuclear powers.

Starting in the 1950s, Russell became a vocal opponent of nuclear 
weapons. With the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World 
Affairs, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto with 
Albert Einstein and organized several conferences. In 1961, 
when he was in his late eighties, he was imprisoned for a 
week in connection with his nuclear disarmament protest at 
Hyde Park and for inciting civil disobedience. He opposed the 
Vietnam War and, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, he organized a 
tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes; this came to be 
known as the Russell Tribunal.

The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation began work in 1963, in 
order to carry forward his work for peace, human rights and 
social justice.

Russell was an early critic of the official story in the John 
F. Kennedy assassination; his "16 Questions on the 
Assassination" from 1964 is still considered a good summary 
of the apparent inconsistencies in that case.

Russell remained politically active to the end, writing and 
exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various 
causes. Some maintain that during his last few years he gave 
his youthful followers too much license and that they used 
his name for some outlandish purposes that a more attentive 
Russell would not have approved. There is evidence to show 
that he became aware of this when he fired his private 
secretary, Ralph Shoenmann, then a young firebrand of the 
radical left.


Bertrand Russell was from an aristocratic English family. 
His paternal grandfather, Lord John Russell, had been Prime 
Minister in the 1840s, and was the second son of the 6th 
Duke of Bedford. The Russells had been prominent for 
several centuries in Britain, and were one of Britain's 
leading Whig / Liberal families. Russell's mother, 
Viscountess Amberley (who died when he was 2), was also from 
an aristocratic family, and was the sister of Rosalind Howard, 
Countess of Carlisle. His parents were quite radical for 
their times. Russell's father, Viscount Amberley (who died 
when Bertrand was 4), was an atheist, and, among other 
things, consented to his wife's affair with their children's 
tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. His godfather was the 
Utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill. His early years 
were spent at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park.

After his parents' premature death, Russell and his older 
brother, Frank, the future 2nd Earl, were raised by their 
staunchly Victorian grandparents, Lord Russell, the former 
Prime Minister, and his second wife, the Countess Russell, 
nee Lady Frances Elliot. Russell also had a sister who died 
when he was an infant. Russell's childhood was very lonely 
and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his 
autobiography that only his keen interest in mathematics 
and his fascination with masturbation seemed to keep him 
interested in living. He was educated at home by a series 
of tutors, and he spent countless hours in his grandfather's 
library. His brother, Frank, (the future 2nd Earl), introduced 
him to Euclid, which transformed Russell's life. Russell was 
primarily raised by his grandmother, who was quite religious, 
and her influence on his outlook on social justice and 
standing up for principle remained with him throughout his 
life.

Russell first met the American Quaker, Alys Pearsall Smith, 
when he was seventeen years old. He fell in love with the 
puritanical, high-minded Alys, who was connected to several 
educationists and religious activists, and, contrary to his 
grandmother's wishes, he married her in December 1894. Their 
marriage was ended by separation in 1911 when Russell realized 
he no longer loved her. Alys pined for him for years and 
continued to love Russell for the rest of her life. During 
this period, Russell had passionate affairs with, among 
others, Lady Ottoline Morrell (half-sister of the 6th Duke 
of Portland) and the actress Lady Constance Malleson.

Russell studied philosophy and logic at Cambridge University, 
starting in 1890, where he became acquainted with the younger 
G.E. Moore, and where he later came under the influence of 
Alfred North Whitehead. He quickly distinguished himself in 
mathematics and philosophy.

Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social 
Democracy, a study in politics, an early indication of an 
interest in political and social theory, areas that would 
attract his attention for the rest of his life.

He became a fellow of Trinity College in 1908. Shortly thereafter 
he first met the very unusual Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose genius 
he immediately recognized. He spent hours dealing with 
Wittgenstein's various phobias and his frequent bouts of 
despair. The latter was often a drain on Russell's energy, but he 
continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic 
development. The first of three volumes of Principia Mathematica 
was published in 1910, which soon made Russell world famous.

During WWI, Russell engaged in pacifist activities that eventually 
landed him in jail (see section above on his activism), and in 
1916 he was dismissed from Trinity College at Cambridge for his 
conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act. In 1920, Russell 
travelled to Russia and subsequently lectured in Peking on 
philosophy for one year. In 1921, he divorced Alys and married 
Dora Russell nee Dora Black. Their children were John Conrad 
Russell (who briefly succeeded his father as 4th Earl Russell) 
and Lady Katherine Russell (now Lady Katherine Tait). Russell 
supported himself during this time by writing popular books 
explaining matters of physics, ethics and education to the 
layman. Together with Dora, he also founded the experimental 
Beacon Hill School in 1927.

Upon the death of his elder brother, Frank, in 1931, Russell
became 3rd Earl Russell. He once said that his title was 
primarily useful for securing hotel rooms and the like.


Russell's marriage to Dora grew increasingly tenuous, and it 
reached a breaking point over her adultery with an American 
journalist. In 1936, he took as his third wife, an Oxford 
undergraduate named Patricia ("Peter") Spence. She had been 
his children's governess in the summer of 1930. Russell and 
Peter had one son, Conrad.

In the spring of 1939, Russell moved to Santa Barbara to lecture 
at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was appointed 
professor at the City College of New York shortly thereafter, but 
after public outcries, the appointment was annulled by the courts: 
his radical opinions made him "morally unfit" to teach at the 
college. The protest was originated by the mother of a student 
who would not even have been eligible for his graduate-level 
course in abstract, mathematical logic. Many intellectuals, led 
by John Dewey, protested his treatment. He soon joined the Barnes 
Foundation as a lecturer, whereupon he began work on The History 
of Western Philosophy. His relationship with the Foundation soon 
soured. He returned to Britain in 1944 and he rejoined the faculty 
of Trinity College.

In 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit. The following year, 
he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Russell's eldest son, John, had a serious mental illness, which 
was often the source of ongoing problems between Russell and 
John's mother, Russell's former wife, Dora.

During the 1950s, Russell participated in a series of interviews 
with the BBC on various topical and philosophical subjects. By 
this time in his life, Russell was world famous outside of 
academic circles, frequently appearing in magazine and newspaper 
articles, and was called upon to offer up opinions on a wide 
variety of subjects, even mundane ones. Along with Einstein, 
Russell had reached a kind of superstar status as an intellectual.

In 1952, Russell divorced Peter, with whom he had been very 
unhappy, and he married his fourth wife, Edith (Finch). They 
had known each other since 1925. Edith had lectured in English 
at Bryn Mawr College, near Philadelphia. Edith remained with him 
until his death, and, by all accounts, their relationship was 
very close and loving throughout their marriage.

Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in various political 
causes, primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposing 
the Vietnam War. He wrote a great many letters to world leaders 
during this period. He also became a hero to many of the 
youthful members of the New Left. During the 1960s, in particular, 
Russell became increasingly vocal about his disapproval of the 
American government's policies.

Bertrand Russell wrote his three volume autobiography in the late 
1960s. While he grew increasingly frail, he remained lucid until 
the end, when, in 1970, he died in his home in Plas Penrhyn, 
Wales. His ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains.

He was succeeded in his titles by his son by his second marriage 
to Dora Russell Black, and then by his younger son (by his third 
marriage to Peter), Conrad Russell (1936-2004), a respected 
historian who was elected hereditary peer to the British 
House of Lords, who, in turn, was succeeded by his son and 
Russell's grandson, Nicholas Russell (born 1968), who is 
now the 6th Earl Russell.

Russell summing up his life

Admitting to failure in helping the world to conquer war and in 
winning his perpetual intellectual battle for eternal truths, 
Russell wrote this in Reflections on my Eightieth Birthday, which 
also served as the last entry in the last volume of his 
autobiography, published in his 97th year:

    I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and 
    social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is 
    beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight 
    to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in 
    imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals 
    grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there 
    is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the 
    world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.



Comments by others about Russell


As a man

"Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of 
any description; but he was a great and good man." A.J. Ayer, 
Bertrand Russell, NY: Viking Press, 1972.


As a philosopher

"It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Russell's 
thought dominated twentieth century analytic philosophy: virtually 
every strand in its development either originated with him or was 
transformed by being transmitted through him. Analytic philosophy 
itself owes its existence more to Russell than to any other 
philosopher." Nicholas Griffen, The Cambridge Companion to 
Bertrand Russell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.


As a writer and his place in history

"Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David 
Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and 
humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of 
one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. 
Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical 
writings." Sidney Hook, Out of Step, An Unquiet Life in the 
20th Century, NY: Carol & Graff, 1988.
[edit]

As a mathematician and logician

Of the Principia: "...its enduring value was simply a deeper 
understanding of the central concepts of mathematics and their 
basic laws and interrelationships. Their total translatability 
into just elementary logic and a simple familiar two-place 
predicate, membership, is of itself a philosophical sensation." 
W.V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science, Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press, 1995. Also regarding the Principia: "This is 
the book that has meant the most to me." from a blurb by Quine 
on Principia Mathematica to *56, an abridged version of the 
Principia, A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1962.

As an activist

"Oh, Bertrand Russell! Oh, Hewlett Johnson! Where, oh where, 
was your flaming conscience at that time?" Alexander I. 
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipeligo, Harper & Row, 1974


From a daughter

"He was the most fascinating man I have ever known, the only man 
I ever loved, the greatest man I shall ever meet, the wittiest, 
the gayest, the most charming. It was a privilege to know him 
and I thank God he was my father." Katherine Tait, My Father 
Bertrand Russell, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.


Further reading


Selected bibliography of Russell's works by year of publication

    * 1896 German Social Democracy, London: Longmans, Green.
    * 1897 An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, 
    Cambridge: At the University Press.
    * 1903 The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge: At the 
    University Press.
    * 1910 Philosophical Essays, London: Logmans, Green.
    * 1910-1913 Principia Mathematica (with Alfred North 
    Whitehead), Cambridge: At the University Press.
    * 1912 The Problems of Philosophy, London: William and 
    Norgate.
    * 1914 Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field 
    for Scientific Method in Philosophy, London: The Open 
    Court Publishing Company.
    * 1916 Principles of Social Reconstruction, London: 
    George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1918 Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: 
    Longmans, Green.
    * 1918 Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and 
    Syndicalism, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1919 Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 
    London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1920 The Analysis of Mind, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1923 The ABC of Relativity, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
    * 1926 On Education, Especially in Early Childhood, 
    London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1927 The Analysis of Matter, London: Kegan Paul, 
    Trench, Trubner.
    * 1927 An Outline of Philosophy, London, George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1927 Why I Am Not A Christian, London: Watts.
    * 1929 Marriage and Morals, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1930 The Conquest of Happiness, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1931 The Scientific Outlook, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1935 Religion and Science, London: Thornton Butterworth.
    * 1938 Power: A New Social Analysis, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1940 An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1945 A History of Western Philosophy: And Its 
    Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the 
    Earliest Times to the Present Day, New York: Simon and 
    Schuster.
    * 1948 Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1950 Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1954 Human Society in Ethics and Politics, London: 
    George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1956 Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, London: 
    George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1967 War Crimes in Vietnam, London: George Allen & Unwin.
    * 1967-1969 The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 
    Volumes 1, 2 & 3, London: George Allen & Unwin.

Note: this is a mere sampling, for Russell authored many more books 
and articles, even some fiction. His works also can be found in 
any number of anthologies and collections, perhaps most notably, 
the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, which McMaster University 
began publishing in 1980. This collection of his shorter and 
previously unpublished works is now up to 14 volumes, and many 
more are forthcoming. An additional 3 volumes catalogue just his 
bibliography. The Russell Archives at McMaster also has more than 
40,000 letters that he wrote.


Books about Russell's philosophy

    * Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, edited by A.D. 
    Irvine, consisting of essays on Russell's work by many 
    distinguished philosophers, 4 vols, London: Routledge, 1999.
    * Theories of Truth, by Richard L. Kirkham (1992). Chapter 4 
    includes a detailed discussion of Russell's theory of truth.
    * Bertrand Russell, John Slater, Thoemmes Press, 1994.
    * The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, edited by P.A. Schlipp, 
    Chicago, 1944.



Biographical books

    * Bertrand Russell: 1872-1920 The Spirit of Solitude by 
    Ray Monk (1997) ISBN 0099731312
    * Bertrand Russell: 1921-70 The Ghost of Madness by Ray 
    Monk (2001) ISBN 009927275X
    * Bertrand Russell: Philosopher and Humanist, by John 
    Lewis (1968)
    * Russell, by A. J. Ayer (1972) ISBN 0226033430
    * The Life of Bertrand Russell, by Ronald W. Clark 
    (1975) ISBN 0394490592
    * Bertrand Russell and His World, by Ronald W. Clark 
    (1981) ISBN 0500130701