Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (18 May 18722 February 1970), was an English mathematician and philosopher. A founder of analytic philosophy, he was a leading philosopher of the 20th century who produced pioneering work in logic, set theory, and philosophy of language. Russell popularised philosophy to the general public and was a controversial figure for his outspoken atheism, pacifism, and opposition to nuclear weapons. Despite his extensive contributions to mathematics, Russell was more known to the public for his books and commentary on several social and political issues.
A grandson of John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Russell was orphaned at the age of four and raised primarily by his grandmother Frances. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and graduated with a first-class degree in 1893. Russell was initially an adherent of British idealism, the dominant philosophy of the time. His friendship with G. E. Moore, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge, led him to analytic philosophy. In Moore and Russell's "revolt against idealism", he rejected dialectic, monism, and idealism and championed logical analysis and pluralism.
Russell was one of the early 20th century's prominent logiciansStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Bertrand Russell" , 1 May 2003. and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy".
Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the England-based India League. He went to prison for his pacifism during the First World War,Samoiloff, Louise Cripps. C .L. R. James: Memories and Commentaries, p. 19. Associated University Presses, 1997. and he initially supported appeasing Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, before changing his view in 1943, describing war as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of the Second World War, he welcomed American global hegemony in preference to either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He later criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, condemned the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, and became an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.
In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 — Bertrand Russell Retrieved on 22 March 2013. He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).
Biography Early life and background Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, a country house in Trellech, Monmouthshire, on 18 May 1872, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy.Sidney Hook, "Lord Russell and the War Crimes Trial", Bertrand Russell: critical assessments, Vol. 1, edited by A. D. Irvine, New York 1999, p. 178. His parents were Viscount and Viscountess Amberley. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's relationship with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Lord Amberley, a deist, asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather.Russell, Bertrand and Perkins, Ray (ed.) Yours faithfully, Bertrand Russell. Open Court Publishing, 2001, p. 4. Mill died the year after Russell's birth, but his writings later influenced Russell's life.
Russell's paternal grandfather, Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell, had twice been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1840s and 1860s. A member of Parliament since the early 1810s, he met Napoleon in Elba. The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty (see: Duke of Bedford). They established themselves as one of the leading Whig families and participated in political events from the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536–1540 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688–1689 and the Great Reform Act in 1832.G. E. Cokayne; Vicary Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday, Geoffrey H. White, Duncan Warrand and Lord Howard de Walden, eds. The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, new ed. 13 volumes in 14. 1910–1959. Reprint in 6 volumes, Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton Publishing, 2000.
Lady Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley. Russell often feared the ridicule of his maternal grandmother, one of the campaigners for education of women.
Childhood and adolescence
Russell had two siblings: brother Frank (seven years older), and sister Rachel (four years older). In June 1874 Russell's mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel's death. In January 1876, his father died of bronchitis after a long period of depression. Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of paternal grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. His grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kind old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the central family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth. The Countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family and petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule), and her influence on Bertrand Russell's outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life.
Russell's adolescence was lonely and he contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his interests in "nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency;"The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Volume I, 1872–1914) George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1971, p. 31; only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors.The Nobel Foundation (1950). Bertrand Russell: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 . Retrieved 11 June 2007. When Russell was eleven, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love".
During these formative years, he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Russell wrote: "I spent all my spare time reading him, and learning him by heart, knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy." Russell said that beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and, two years later, that there is no life after death. Finally, at the age of 18, after reading Mill's Autobiography, he abandoned the "First Cause" argument and became an atheist.
He travelled to the continent in 1890 with an American friend, Edward FitzGerald, and with FitzGerald's family he visited the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and climbed the Eiffel Tower soon after it was completed.
Education
Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, and began his studies there in 1890, taking as coach Robert Rumsey Webb. He became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles. He distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating as seventh Wrangler in the former in 1893 and becoming a Fellow in the latter in 1895. During his time at Cambridge, Russell increasingly turned from mathematics toward philosophy, influenced by contemporary debates about idealism and the foundations of geometry. Although initially sympathetic to British Idealism, he later rejected it, developing the realist approach that would become central to analytic philosophy. His early academic work focused on the logical foundations of mathematics, culminating in his first major publication, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897).
Russell's election to a Fellowship at Trinity College in 1895 provided him with financial independence and the freedom to pursue research. During these formative years, he began the investigations into logic and set theory that would eventually lead to his work on logicism and his collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead on Principia Mathematica.
Early career
Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy, a study in politics that was an early indication of his interest in political and social theory. In 1896 he taught German social democracy at the London School of Economics. He was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
He now started a study of the foundations of mathematics at Trinity. In 1897, he wrote An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (submitted at the Fellowship Examination of Trinity College) which discussed the Cayley–Klein metrics used for non-Euclidean geometry.Russell, Bertrand (1897) An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, p. 32, re-issued 1956 by Dover Books He attended the first International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in 1900 where he met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro Padoa. The Italians had responded to Georg Cantor, making a science of set theory; they gave Russell their literature including the Formulario mathematico. Russell was impressed by the precision of Peano's arguments at the Congress, read the literature upon returning to England, and came upon Russell's paradox. In 1903 he published The Principles of Mathematics, a work on the foundations of mathematics. It advanced a thesis of logicism, that mathematics and logic are one and the same.
In February 1901, at the age of 29, Russell underwent what he called a "sort of mystic illumination", after witnessing Whitehead's wife's suffering in an angina attack. "I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable", Russell would later recall. "At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person."
In 1905, he wrote the essay "On Denoting", which was published in the philosophical journal Mind. Russell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1908. The three-volume Principia Mathematica, written with Whitehead, was published between 1910 and 1913. This, along with the earlier The Principles of Mathematics, soon made Russell world-famous in his field. Russell's first political activity was as the Independent Liberal candidate in the 1907 by-election for the Wimbledon constituency, where he was not elected.