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Bertrand Russell

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophers

                               Western Philosophy
   20th-century philosophy
   Bertrand Russell
         Name:       Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
        Birth:       18 May 1872
                     Trellech, Monmouthshire, Wales
        Death:       2 February 1970
                     Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales
   School/tradition: Analytic philosophy
    Main interests:  Ethics, epistemology, logic, mathematics, philosophy of
                     language, philosophy of science, religion
    Notable ideas:   Logical atomism, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge
                     by description, Russell's paradox, Russell's teapot.
      Influences:    Leibniz, Hume, G.E. Moore, Frege, Whitehead, Wittgenstein,
                     Mill
      Influenced:    Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Karl
                     Popper, W. V. Quine

   Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell OM FRS ( 18 May 1872
   – 2 February 1970), was a British philosopher, logician, and
   mathematician, working mostly in the 20th century. A prolific writer,
   Bertrand Russell was also a populariser of philosophy and a commentator
   on a large variety of topics, ranging from very serious issues to the
   mundane. Continuing a family tradition in political affairs, he was a
   prominent anti-war activist for most of his long life, championing free
   trade between nations and anti-imperialism. 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.

   Russell was born at the height of Britain's economic and political
   ascendancy. He died of influenza nearly a century later, at a time when
   the British Empire had all but vanished, its power dissipated by two
   debilitating world wars. As one of the world's best-known
   intellectuals, Russell's voice carried great moral authority, even into
   his mid 90s. Among his political activities, Russell was a vigorous
   proponent of nuclear disarmament and an outspoken critic of the
   American war in Vietnam.

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

Biography

   Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Trellech, Monmouthshire, in
   Wales, into an aristocratic English family.

Ancestry

   His paternal grandfather, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, had been the
   British Prime Minister in the 1840s and 1860s, and was the second son
   of John Russell, 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 Kate (née Stanley) was also
   from an aristocratic family, and was the sister of Rosalind Howard,
   Countess of Carlisle. Russell's parents were quite radical for their
   times—Russell's father, Viscount Amberley, was an atheist and consented
   to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas
   Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when
   this was considered scandalous. John Stuart Mill, the Utilitarian
   philosopher, was Russell's godfather.

Childhood and adolescence

   Russell had two siblings: Frank (nearly seven years older than
   Bertrand), and Rachel (four years older). In June 1874 Russell's mother
   died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel, and in January 1876 his
   father also died of bronchitis following a long period of depression.
   Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of their staunchly Victorian
   grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. The first
   Earl Russell died in 1878, and his widow the Countess Russell (née Lady
   Frances Elliot) was the dominant family figure for the rest of
   Russell's childhood and youth. The countess was from a Scottish
   Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned a British court 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. However, the atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one
   of frequent prayer, emotional repression and formality - Frank reacted
   to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his
   feelings.

   Russell's adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated
   suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests
   were in sex, religion and mathematics, and that only the wish to know
   more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a
   series of tutors, and he spent countless hours in his grandfather's
   library. His brother Frank introduced him to Euclid, which transformed
   Russell's life.

University and first marriage

   Russell won a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity College,
   Cambridge University, and commenced his studies there in 1890. He
   became acquainted with the younger G.E. Moore and came under the
   influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the
   Cambridge Apostles. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and
   philosophy, graduating with a B.A. in the former subject in 1893 and
   adding a fellowship in the latter in 1895.

   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 began to fall apart in 1902 when Russell
   realised he no longer loved her; they divorced nineteen years later.
   During this period, Russell had passionate (and often simultaneous)
   affairs with, among others, Lady Ottoline Morrell and the actress, Lady
   Constance Malleson. Alys pined for him for these years and continued to
   love Russell for the rest of her life.

Early career

   Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy,
   a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest
   in political and social theory. In 1896, he taught German social
   democracy at the London School of Economics, where he also lectured on
   the science of power in the autumn of 1937. He was also a member of the
   Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the
   Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

   Russell became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908. The first of
   three volumes of Principia Mathematica (written with Whitehead) was
   published in 1910, which (along with the earlier The Principles of
   Mathematics) soon made Russell world famous in his field. In 1911, he
   became acquainted with the Austrian engineering student Ludwig
   Wittgenstein, who he viewed as a genius and a successor who would
   continue his work on logic. 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, including the publication of
   Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922.

First World War

   During the first World War, Russell engaged in pacifist activities,
   and, in 1916, he was dismissed from Trinity College following his
   conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act. A later conviction
   resulted in six months' imprisonment in Brixton prison (see Activism).

Between the wars, and second marriage

   In 1920, Russell travelled to Russia as part of an official delegation
   sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the
   Russian Revolution. Russell's lover Dora Black also visited Russia
   independently at the same time - she was enthusiastic about the
   revolution, but Russell's experiences destroyed his previous tentative
   support for it.

   Russell subsequently lectured in Beijing on philosophy for one year,
   accompanied by Dora. While in China, Russell became gravely ill with
   pneumonia, and incorrect reports of his death were published in the
   Japanese press. When the couple visited Japan on their return journey,
   Dora notified journalists that "Mr Bertrand Russell, having died
   according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to
   Japanese journalists".

   On the couple's return to England in 1921, Dora was five months
   pregnant, and Russell arranged a hasty divorce from Alys, marrying Dora
   six days after the divorce was finalised. Their children were John
   Conrad Russell, 4th Earl Russell and Katharine Jane Russell (now Lady
   Katharine 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. After he left the school in 1932, Dora continued
   it until 1943.

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

   Russell's marriage to Dora grew increasingly tenuous, and it reached a
   breaking point over her having two children with an American
   journalist, Griffin Barry. In 1936, he took as his third wife an Oxford
   undergraduate named Patricia ("Peter") Spence, who had been his
   children's governess since the summer of 1930. Russell and Peter had
   one son, Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, later to become a prominent
   historian, and one of the leading figures in the Liberal Democrat
   party.

Second World War

   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 in 1940, but after a public outcry the
   appointment was annulled by a court judgement: his opinions (especially
   those relating to sexual morality, detailed in Marriage and Morals ten
   years earlier) made him "morally unfit" to teach at the college. The
   protest was started by the mother of a student who (as a woman) would
   not have been eligible for his graduate-level course in mathematical
   logic. Many intellectuals, led by John Dewey, protested his treatment.
   Dewey and Horace M. Kallen edited a collection of articles on the CCNY
   affair in The Bertrand Russell Case. He soon joined the Barnes
   Foundation, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of philosophy
   - these lectures formed the basis of A History of Western Philosophy.
   His relationship with the eccentric Albert C. Barnes soon soured, and
   he returned to Britain in 1944 to rejoin the faculty of Trinity
   College.

Later life

   During the 1940s and 1950s, Russell participated in many broadcasts
   over the BBC on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this
   time in his life, Russell was world famous outside of academic circles,
   frequently the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles,
   and was called upon to offer up opinions on a wide variety of subjects,
   even mundane ones. En route to one of his lectures in Trondheim,
   Russell survived a plane crash in October 1948. A History of Western
   Philosophy (1945) became a best-seller, and provided Russell with a
   steady income for the remainder of his life. Along with his friend
   Albert Einstein, Russell had reached superstar status as an
   intellectual. In 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the
   following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

   In 1952, Russell was divorced by Peter, with whom he had been very
   unhappy. Conrad, Russell's son by Peter, did not see his father between
   the time of the divorce and 1968 (at which time his decision to meet
   his father caused a permanent breach with his mother). Russell married
   his fourth wife, Edith Finch, soon after the divorce, in December 1952.
   They had known each other since 1926, and Edith had lectured English at
   Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sharing a house for
   twenty years with Russell's old friend Lucy Donnelly. Edith remained
   with him until his death, and, by all accounts, their relationship was
   close and loving throughout their marriage. Russell's eldest son, John,
   suffered from serious mental illness, which was the source of ongoing
   disputes between Russell and John's mother, Russell's former wife,
   Dora. John's wife Susan was also mentally ill, and eventually Russell
   and Edith became the legal guardians of their three daughters (two of
   whom were later diagnosed with schizophrenia).

Political causes

   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. In 1963 he
   became the inaugural recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, an award for
   writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.

Final years and death

   Bertrand Russell published his three-volume autobiography in 1967, 1968
   and in 1969, which was the final volume. Whilst he grew frail, he
   remained lucid until the end. On 31 January 1970 he condemned what he
   saw as the "Israel aggression in the Middle East", saying that "We are
   frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the
   suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. ... What
   Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horror of
   the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy". This was
   read out at the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo
   on 3 February 1970.

   Bertrand Russell died at 6.30 pm on 2 February 1970 at his home, Plas
   Penrhyn, Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth, Wales of influenza. He had
   previously fought that illness off in late December 1969. His ashes, as
   his will directed, were scattered after his cremation three days later.

Russell's philosophical work

Analytic philosophy

   Russell is generally recognised as one of the founders of analytic
   philosophy, 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 30 years later in Vienna by the logical positivists' "revolt
   against metaphysics". Russell was particularly critical of a doctrine
   he ascribed to idealism and coherentism, this he dubbed the doctrine of
   internal relations, which, Russell suggested, held that in order to
   know any particular thing, we must know all of its relations. Based on
   this Russell attempted to show that this would make space, time,
   science and the concept of number not fully intelligible. 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 grammatical components.
   Russell, in particular, saw formal 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
   Ockham's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities, Occam's
   Razor, as a central part of the method of analysis.

Logic and philosophy of mathematics

   Russell had great influence on modern mathematical logic. The American
   philosopher and logician Willard Quine said Russell's work represented
   the greatest influence on his own work.

   Russell's first mathematical book, 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, while materials in
   the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University include notes of
   his reading in algebraic logic by Charles S. Peirce and Ernst Schröder.
   He became convinced that the foundations of mathematics were tied to
   logic, and following Gottlob Frege took an extensionalist approach in
   which logic was in turn based upon set theory. In 1900 he attended the
   first International Congress of Philosophy 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. Between 1897 and 1903 he published several articles applying
   Peano's notation to the classical Boole-Schröder algebra of relations,
   among them On the Notion of Order, Sur la logique des relations avec
   les applications à la théorie des séries, and On Cardinal Numbers.

   Russell 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. He did this in 1903, when he published
   The Principles of Mathematics, in which the concept of class is
   inextricably tied to the definition of number. The appendix to this
   work detailed a paradox arising in Frege's application of second- and
   higher-order functions which took first-order functions as their
   arguments, and he offered his first effort to resolve what would
   henceforth come to be known as the Russell Paradox. In writing
   Principles, Russell came across Cantor's proof that there was no
   greatest cardinal number, which Russell believed was mistaken. The
   Cantor Paradox in turn was shown (for example by Crossley) to be a
   special case of the Russell Paradox. This caused Russell 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 comprehension,
   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, and 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 realised, 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 neither Principia Mathematica, nor any other
   consistent system of primitive recursive arithmetic, could, within that
   system, determine that every proposition that could be formulated
   within that system was decidable, i.e. could decide whether that
   proposition or its negation was provable within the system ( Gödel's
   incompleteness theorem).

   Russell's last significant work in mathematics and logic, Introduction
   to Mathematical Philosophy, was written by hand 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 in the Mind philosophical
   journal, which the mathematician and philosopher Frank P. 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? (Roughly the
   same problem would arise if there were two kings of France at present:
   which of them does "the king of France" denote?) 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, employing
   his distinction between sense and reference, suggested that such
   sentences, although meaningful, were neither true nor false. But 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," seem not only
   truth-valuable but indeed obviously true.

   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 functioning correctly?

   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. Strawson also claims that
   a denoting phrase that does not, in fact, denote anything could be
   supposed to follow the role of a "Widgy's inverted truth-value" and
   expresses the opposite meaning of the intended phrase. This can be
   shown using the example of "The present king of France is bald". Taken
   with the inverted truth-value methodology the meaning of this sentence
   becomes "It is true that there is no present king of France who is
   bald" which changes the denotation of 'the present king of France' from
   a primary denotation to a secondary one.

   Wittgenstein, Russell's student, achieved considerable prominence in
   the philosophy of language after the posthumous publication of the
   Philosophical Investigations. In Russell's opinion, Wittgenstein's
   later work was misguided, and he decried its influence and that of its
   followers (especially members of the so-called "Oxford school" of
   ordinary language philosophy, who he believed were promoting a kind of
   mysticism). Russell's belief that philosophy's task is not limited to
   examining ordinary language is once again widely accepted in
   philosophy.

Logical atomism

   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.

Epistemology

   Russell's epistemology went through many phases. Once he shed
   neo-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 favour, his influence remains strong 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 inferred, or reasoned to—i.e. 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/psychologist, William James, and one that was
   first formulated by Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly admired.
   Instead of James' "pure experience", however, Russell characterised the
   stuff of our initial states of perception as "events", a stance which
   is curiously akin to his old teacher Whitehead's process philosophy.

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 specialised. 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 physics, and he
   even authored several popular science books, The ABC of Atoms (1923)
   and The ABC of Relativity (1925).

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 characterised as the patron
   saint of rationality, he agreed with Hume, who said that reason ought
   to be subordinate to ethical considerations.

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 says 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.

   In his 1949 speech, "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?", Russell
   expressed his difficulty over whether to call himself an atheist or an
   agnostic:

     As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic
     audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an
     Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument
     by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I
     am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street
     I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I
     say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add
     equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

     —Bertrand Russell, Collected Papers, vol. 11, p. 91

   Though he would later question God's existence, he fully accepted the
   ontological argument during his undergraduate years,:

     I remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking
     along Trinity Lane [at Cambridge University where Russell was a
     student], when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the
     ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of
     tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air, and
     exclaimed as I caught it: "Great Scott, the ontological argument is
     sound!"

     —Bertrand Russell, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1967.

   This quote has been exploited by many theologians over the years, such
   as by Louis Pojman in his Philosophy of Religion, who wish for readers
   to believe that even a well-known atheist-philosopher supports this
   particular argument for God's existence.

   Russell also made an influential analysis of the omphalos hypothesis
   enunciated by Philip Henry Gosse—that any argument suggesting that the
   world was created as if it were already in motion could just as easily
   make it a few minutes old as a few thousand years:

     There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world
     sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a
     population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no
     logically necessary connection between events at different times;
     therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future
     can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

     —Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 1921, pp. 159–60; cf.
     Philosophy, Norton, 1927, p. 7, where Russell acknowledges Gosse's
     paternity of this anti-evolutionary argument.

   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 0-671-20323-1). Its title essay was a talk given on March 6, 1927
   at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices of the South London Branch
   of the National Secular Society, UK, and published later that year as a
   pamphlet. The book also contains other essays in which 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 discusses specifics
   about Christian theology.

   His 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.

     —Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on
     Religion and Related Subjects

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 purely
   tautological truths. Evidence of Russell's influence on Wittgenstein
   can be seen throughout the Tractatus, which Russell was instrumental in
   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 linguistic and analytic 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.

   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 Schoenman, then a young firebrand of the radical left.

Pacifism, war and nuclear weapons

   While never a complete pacifist (in 'The Ethics of War', an article
   published in 1915, Russell argued on utilitarian grounds that wars of
   colonization were legitimate where the side with the stronger culture
   could put the land to better use), Russell opposed British
   participation in World War I. As a result, he was first fined, then
   lost his professorship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was later
   imprisoned for six months. In 1943 Russell called his stance "relative
   political 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 1940 he acknowledged that in order to preserve
   democracy, Hitler had to be defeated.

   Russell was opposed to the use and possession of nuclear weapons for
   most of their existence, but he may not have always been of that
   opinion. On November 20, 1948, in a public speech at Westminster
   School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth,
   Russell shocked some observers with comments that seemed to suggest a
   preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union might be justified.
   Russell apparently argued that the threat of war between the United
   States and the Soviet Union would enable the United States to force the
   Soviet Union to accept the Baruch Plan for international atomic energy
   control. (Earlier in the year he had written in the same vein to Walter
   W. Marseille.) Russell felt this plan "had very great merits and showed
   considerable generosity, when it is remembered that America still had
   an unbroken nuclear monopoly." (Has Man a Future?, 1961). However
   Nicholas Griffin of McMaster University, in his book The Selected
   Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, has claimed
   (after obtaining a transcript of the speech) that Russell's wording
   implies he didn't advocate the actual use of the atom bomb, but merely
   its diplomatic use as a massive source of leverage over the actions of
   the Soviets. Griffin's interpretation was slammed by Nigel Lawson, the
   former British Finance Minister, who was present at the speech and who
   claims it was quite clear to the audience that Russell was advocating
   an actual First Strike. Whichever interpretation is correct, Russell
   later relented, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear
   powers, possibly linked to some form of world government.

   In 1955 Russell released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, co-signed by
   Albert Einstein and nine other leading scientists and intellectuals,
   which led to the first of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World
   Affairs in 1957. In 1958, Russell became the first president of the
   Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He resigned two years later when the
   CND would not support civil disobedience, and formed the Committee of
   100. In 1961, when he was in his late eighties, he was imprisoned for a
   week for inciting civil disobedience, in connection with protests at
   the Ministry of Defence and Hyde Park.

   Russell made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war
   Bollywood film " Aman" which was released in India in 1967. This was
   Russell's only appearance in a feature film.

   The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation began work in 1963, in order to
   carry forward Russell's work for peace, human rights and social
   justice. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Jean-Paul Sartre,
   he organised a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes; this came
   to be known as the Russell Tribunal.

   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.

Communism and socialism

   Russell visited the Soviet Union and met Lenin in 1920, and on his
   return wrote a critical tract, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism.
   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, similar in some ways to yet possessing important differences
   with the conception promoted by the Fabian Society. He was strongly
   critical of Stalin's regime, and of the practices of states proclaiming
   Marxism and Communism generally. Russell was a consistent enthusiast
   for democracy and world government, and advocated the establishment of
   a democratic international government in some of the essays collected
   in In Praise of Idleness (1935), and also in Has Man a Future? (1961).

     One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of
     human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as
     much as to the Church of Rome. The hopes which inspire communism
     are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on
     the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do
     as much harm.

     —Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920

     For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent
     Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian
     revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic
     justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine
     production demanded by considerations of common sense, and
     calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but
     of all except a tiny minority of the human race.

     —Bertrand Russell, "The Case for Socialism" (In Praise of Idleness,
     1935)

     Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease
     and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for
     some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be
     as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have
     been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for
     ever.

     —Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935

Women's suffrage

   As a young man, Russell was a member of the Liberal Party and wrote in
   favour 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.

Sexuality

   Russell wrote against Victorian notions of morality. Marriage and
   Morals (1929) 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, and advocated "trial marriages" or
   "companionate marriage", formalised relationships whereby young people
   could legitimately have sexual intercourse without being expected to
   remain married in the long term or to have children (an idea first
   proposed by Judge Ben Lindsey). This might not seem extreme by today's
   standards, but it was enough to raise vigorous protests and
   denunciations against him during his visit to the United States shortly
   after the book's publication. Russell was also ahead of his time in
   advocating open sex education and widespread access to contraception.
   He also advocated easy divorce, but only if the marriage had produced
   no children - Russell's view was that parents should remain married but
   tolerant of each other's sexual infidelity, if they had children. This
   reflected his life at the time - his second wife Dora was openly having
   an affair, and would soon become pregnant by another man, but Russell
   was keen for their children John and Kate to have a "normal" family
   life.

   Russell's private life was even more unconventional and freewheeling
   than his published writings revealed, but that was not well known at
   the time. For example, philosopher Sidney Hook reports that Russell
   often spoke of his sexual prowess and of his various conquests.

Eugenics and race

   Some critics of Russell have pointed out racist passages in his early
   writings, as well as his initial praise for the then-fashionable idea
   of eugenics. For example, in early editions of his book Marriage and
   Morals (1929) he asserted:

     In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one
     race to another.... It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as
     on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the
     tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart
     from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable.

     —Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (1929)

   Later in his life, Russell criticized eugenic programs for their
   vulnerability to corruption, and, by 1932, he was to condemn the
   "unwarranted assumption" that "Negroes are congenitally inferior to
   white men" (Education and the Social Order, Chap. 3). Racism rapidly
   declined in acceptance throughout the second half of the 20th century.
   In fact, Russell seems to have been one of the leaders of change in
   this sphere. He wrote a chapter on "Racial Antagonism" in New Hopes for
   a Changing World (1951):

     It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically
     undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is
     there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally
     less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be
     difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good
     social conditions.

     —Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World (London: Allen &
     Unwin, 1951, p. 108)

   There is a much later condemnation-in-passing of racism in Russell's "
   16 Questions on the Assassination" (1964), in which he mentions
   "Senator Russell of Georgia and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana ...
   whose racist views have brought shame on the United States".

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 98th 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.

     —Bertrand Russell, "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday"

Comments about Russell

His appearance

          "It is impossible to describe Bertrand Russell except by saying
          that he looks like the Mad Hatter."

                — Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
                1953.

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 Griffin, 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 colour,
          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.

          "Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing
          with mathematical logic in red—and all students of philosophy
          should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in
          blue—and no one should be allowed to read them."

                — Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Rush Rhees, Recollections of
                Wittgenstein, Oxford Paperbacks, 1984.

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.

As an activist

          "Oh, Bertrand Russell! Oh, Hewlett Johnson! Where, oh where, was
          your flaming conscience at that time?"

                — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper &
                Row, 1974.

As a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature

          In other words, it was specifically not for his incontestably
          great contributions to philosophy—The Principles of Mathematics,
          'On Denoting' and Principia Mathematica—that he was being
          honoured, but for the later work that his fellow philosophers
          were unanimous in regarding as inferior.

                — Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, The Ghost of Madness, p.
                332.

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."

                — Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell, NY: Harcourt
                Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 202.

Succession

        Peerage of the United Kingdom
   Preceded by:
   Frank Russell Earl Russell
                 1931–1970   Succeeded by:
                             John Russell

              Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1926-1950)

   1926:  Deledda | 1927:  Bergson | 1928:  Undset | 1929:  Mann | 1930:
   Lewis | 1931:  Karlfeldt | 1932:  Galsworthy | 1933:  Bunin | 1934:
   Pirandello | 1936:  O'Neill | 1937:  Martin du Gard | 1938:  Buck |
   1939:  Sillanpää | 1944:  Jensen | 1945:  G.Mistral | 1946:  Hesse |
   1947:  Gide | 1948: Eliot | 1949:  Faulkner | 1950: Russell
     __________________________________________________________________

       Complete List | Laureates (1901-1925) | Laureates (1951-1975) |
                 Laureates (1976-2000) | Laureates (2001- )

                               Persondata
   NAME              Russel, Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd Earl Russell
   ALTERNATIVE NAMES
   SHORT DESCRIPTION philosopher, logician, and mathematician
   DATE OF BIRTH     18 May 1872
   PLACE OF BIRTH    Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom
   DATE OF DEATH     2 February 1970
   PLACE OF DEATH    Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, United Kingdom
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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