Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, a country house in Trellech, Monmouthshire. He died on 2 February 1970. Across a long public life, he was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual whose work influenced mathematics, logic, set theory, and several areas of analytic philosophy. He belonged to an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy, and the political temper of that family was part of the world he inherited.

Russell became one of the early 20th century’s leading logicians and one of the founders of analytic philosophy, alongside Gottlob Frege, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. With Moore, he led the British “revolt against idealism.” With his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, he wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic. His article “On Denoting” has been considered a “paradigm of philosophy.”

His education and early life gave his thought both discipline and pressure. Russell was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he began in 1890, graduated in 1893, and became a Fellow in 1895. He won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos, distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, and came under the influence of Whitehead. At Cambridge he also became acquainted with the younger G. E. Moore. Though he was at first sympathetic to British Idealism, he later rejected it and developed the realist approach that became central to analytic philosophy.

Russell’s childhood was marked by loss and by strong-minded guardians. His mother died of diphtheria in 1874, followed shortly by the death of his sister Rachel; his father died in 1876. Russell and his brother Frank were raised by their paternal grandparents at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. His grandmother, the Countess Russell, was religiously conservative but held progressive views in other areas, accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule. Russell later said her influence on his outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life.

Books and mathematics also shaped him early. As a lonely adolescent, he contemplated suicide, later writing that his interests in “nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency.” At eleven, Frank introduced him to Euclid, which Russell described as “one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love.” He read Percy Bysshe Shelley closely, thought deeply about Christian religious dogma from the age of fifteen, and by eighteen, after reading Mill’s Autobiography, abandoned the “First Cause” argument and became an atheist.

Russell’s public life was as restless as his philosophy. A pacifist and champion of anti-imperialism, he chaired the England-based India League and went to prison for his pacifism during the First World War. His views on war and power changed over time: he initially supported appeasing Nazi Germany, then in 1943 described war as a necessary “lesser of two evils.” After the Second World War he welcomed American global hegemony over Soviet hegemony or ineffective world leadership, even at the cost of nuclear weapons, but later criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, condemned United States involvement in Vietnam, and became an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for writings that championed humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. That combination of logic, moral argument, and public courage is why his words still carry force.