Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual. He influenced mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic philosophy.
He was one of the early 20th century's prominent logicians 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. Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy".
Russell was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated in 1893. He 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, 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 world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He would later criticise Stalinist totalitarianism, condemn the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, and become 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". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal, Sylvester Medal, Kalinga Prize, and Jerusalem Prize.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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, and sister Rachel. 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, 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, 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 mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. 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.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 which discussed the Cayley–Klein metrics used for non-Euclidean geometry. 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.
At the age of 29, in February 1901, 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 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.
In 1910, he became a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College, where he had studied. He was considered for a fellowship, which would give him a vote in the college government and protect him from being fired for his opinions, but was passed over because he was "anti-clerical", because he was agnostic. He was approached by the Austrian engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who started undergraduate study with him. Russell viewed Wittgenstein as a successor who would continue his work on logic. He spent hours dealing with Wittgenstein's various phobias and his bouts of despair. This was a drain on Russell's energy, but Russell continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development, including the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. Russell delivered his lectures on logical atomism, his version of these ideas, in 1918, before the end of World War I.
First World War
During World War I, Russell was one of the few people to engage in active pacifist activities. In 1916, due to his absence of allegiance to the war effort, he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. He later described this, in Free Thought and Official Propaganda, as an illegitimate means the state used to violate freedom of expression. Russell championed the case of Eric Chappelow, a poet jailed and abused as a conscientious objector. Russell played a part in the Leeds Convention in June 1917, a historic event which saw well over a thousand "anti-war socialists" gather; many being delegates from the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party, united in their pacifist beliefs and advocating a peace settlement. The international press reported that Russell appeared with a number of Labour Members of Parliament, including Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, as well as former Liberal MP and anti-conscription campaigner, Professor Arnold Lupton. After the event, Russell told Lady Ottoline Morrell that, "to my surprise, when I got up to speak, I was given the greatest ovation that was possible to give anybody".His conviction in 1916 resulted in Russell being fined £100, which he refused to pay in the hope that he would be sent to prison, but his books were sold at auction to raise the money. The books were bought by friends; he later treasured his copy of the King James Bible that was stamped "Confiscated by Cambridge Police".
A later conviction for publicly lecturing against inviting the United States to enter the war on the United Kingdom's side resulted in six months' imprisonment in Brixton Prison in 1918. He later said of his imprisonment:
While he was reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians chapter about Gordon he laughed out loud in his cell prompting the warder to intervene and reminding him that "prison was a place of punishment".
Russell was reinstated to Trinity in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944 until 1949.
In 1924, Russell again gained press attention when attending a "banquet" in the House of Commons with well-known campaigners, including Arnold Lupton, who had been an MP and had also endured imprisonment for "passive resistance to military or naval service".