Bertrand Russell

Overview

British polymath Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born on May 18, 1872, and died on February 2, 1970. As an academic, he worked in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, and logic. His work has influenced several fields of analytic philosophy, including philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, as well as cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, set theory, and computer science. He was a political activist, social critic, historian, public activist, and Nobel laureate. Born in Monmouthshire, he belonged to one of the most well-known aristocratic families in the UK.

Along with his colleague and friend G. E. Moore, student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his predecessor Gottlob Frege, Russell was one of the most well-known logicians of the early 20th century and one of the founders of analytical philosophy. Russell and Moore were the lead leaders of the British "revolt against idealism." Russell co-wrote Principia Mathematica with his old instructor, A. N. Whitehead, which is considered to be a turning point in the development of classical logic and a significant attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). It is said that Russell's work "On Denoting" represents a "paradigm of philosophy."

As the chairman of the India League, Russell was a humanist who supported anti-imperialism. Before the atomic monopoly opportunity had passed, he occasionally supported preventive nuclear war and declared he would "welcome with enthusiasm" global leadership. During World War I, he was imprisoned for his pacifism. Eventually, Russell concluded that the fight against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was a necessary "lesser of two evils." Russell was also a vocal supporter of nuclear disarmament, denounced Stalinist dictatorship, and condemned the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War.

Russell won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 "in recognition of his significant and varied writings in which he promotes freedom of thought and humanitarian ideals." In addition, he was honored with the Jerusalem Prize (1963), Kalinga Prize (1957), Sylvester Medal (1934), and De Morgan Medal (1932).

Russell identified as a liberal, socialist, and pacifist throughout his life, but he subsequently stated that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense."

Early Year and Upbringing

Bertrand was born on May 18, 1872, at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom, Arthur William Russell was born into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His parents, Viscountess Amberley and Viscount were radical for their times.

Earl Russell, his paternal grandfather, served as prime minister twice between the 1840s and the 1860s. The Russells were well-known in England for a number of centuries prior to this, rising to the peerage and power with the Tudor dynasty. They made a name for themselves as one of the most prominent British Whig families. They took part in all of the major political events, including the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-1540.

Early Life and Teenage Years

Russell had two siblings: a sister, Rachel (4 years older), and a brother, Frank (almost 7 years older than Bertrand). Russell's mother passed away from diphtheria in June 1874, and Rachel passed away soon after. Following an extended period of depression, his father passed away from bronchitis in January 1876. Earl Russell, the former prime minister, was remembered by Russell as a kind elderly man who used a wheelchair when he passed away in 1878. For the remainder of Russell's early years, his grandmother, Countess Russell, acted as the head of the family.

The countess came from a Presbyterian family in Scotland. She was successful in her plea to the Court of Chancery to have a provision in Amberley's will demanding that the children be raised astics. She was conservative in her religious beliefs but progressive in other respects (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule). Bertrand Russell was influenced by her views on social justice and sticking up for what is right throughout his life. His motto was inspired by her favorite versed of the Bible: "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil."

Russell had an extremely lonely teenage years and thought of taking his own life several times. In his autobiography, he stated that his greatest passions were books and nature and (later) mathematics saved him from complete despair" and that the only thing that prevented him from taking his own life was his desire to learn more mathematics. A number of tutors taught him at home. Russell was first introduced to Euclid's work at the age of eleven by his brother Frank, which he later referred to in his book as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love."

Russell claimed that he began considering the very integrity of Christian religious dogma at the age of 15, and he considered it to be highly unconvincing. At this age, he concluded that there is no such thing as free choice and, two years later, that there is no life at all after death. Finally, at the age of eighteen, he gave up on the "First Cause" theory and became an atheist after reading Mill's Autobiography.

In 1890, he went to Europe with his American friend Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald's family took him to the Paris Exhibition of 1889, where he was able to climb the Eiffel Tower shortly after its completion.

University and First Marriage

Russell began his college education at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890 under the guidance of Robert Rumsey Webb after receiving a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos. He met the younger George Edward Moore and was influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, who proposed him to the Cambridge Apostles. In 1893, he graduated as eighth Wrangler in mathematics, and in 1895, he became a Fellow in philosophy, demonstrating his rapid distinction in both fields.

In the summer of 1889, at the age of seventeen, Russell met the Smith family. Alys Pearsall Smith was an American Quaker who had graduated from Bryn Mawr College, located close to Philadelphia, and was five years older than Russell. He became friends with the Pearsall Smith family, who recognized him mainly as "Lord John's grandson" and took pleasure in showing him off.

He soon fell in love with the religious, puritanical Alys and married her on December 13, 1894, against the will of his grandmother. In 1901, while cycling, Russell realized he no longer loved her, and that's when their marriage started to break apart. He told her that he didn't love her anymore when she inquired. The marriage was destined to be a lifeless shell. Following Russell's affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1911, a lengthy period of separation commenced; in 1921, he and Alys eventually divorced to allow Russell to remarry.

Russell had intense (and often simultaneous) romances with several women during the years he was apart from Alys, including Morrell and actress Lady Constance Malleson. According to some, he had an affair at this point with Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the English writer and governess and T. S. Eliot's first wife.

Early Professional Life

With German Social Democracy, his first published book in 1896, Russell demonstrated his lifelong interest in political and social philosophy. He was a German social democratic lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1896. He was a member of the social reformer Coefficients dining club, which was founded in 1902 by two prominent Fabian activists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

He now began studying the fundamentals of mathematics in depth at Trinity. He covered the Cayley-Klein metrics used for non-Euclidean geometry in his 1897 essay- "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry," which was submitted for Trinity College's Fellowship Examination. He met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro Padoa in 1900 while attending the First International Congress of Philosophy in Paris. The Italians had developed a science of set theory in response to Georg Cantor; they handed Russell their work, which included the Formulario mathematico. After returning to England and reading the literature, Russell was struck by how well-reasoned Peano's arguments were at the Congress and came upon Russell's paradox. His work on the foundations of mathematics, The Principles of Mathematics, was released in 1903. It promoted the logicism thesis, which holds that logic and mathematics are the same thing.

In February 1901, when Russell was 29 years old, he experienced what he described as a "sort of mystic illumination" after seeing Whitehead's wife suffer greatly from an angina attack.

He authored an essay titled "On Denoting" in 1905, and the philosophical journal Mind published it. In 1908, Russell was chosen to become a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). During 1910 and 1913, Whitehead and Russel worked together to produce the three volumes of Principia Mathematica. Russell quickly became well-known in his field thanks to this and the earlier The Principles of Mathematics.

He was appointed a lecturer at Trinity College, where he had studied at the University of Cambridge in 1910. He was rejected from consideration for a Fellowship, which would have allowed him to vote in college government and shielded him from being dismissed for his beliefs, on the basis that he was "anti-clerical," which is code for being agnostic. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian engineering student who later became his PhD student, approached him. Russell believed Wittgenstein to be a brilliant man and an appropriate successor who would carry on his work on logic. He spent hours addressing Wittgenstein's numerous fears and his ongoing bouts of hopelessness. This frequently drained Russell's energies, but Russell never lost interest in him and supported Wittgenstein's scholarly advancement, resulting in the 1922 publication of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Before World War I ended in 1918, Russell presented his lectures on logical atomism and his explanation of these concepts. At the end of the war, Wittgenstein served for nine months in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp while still a member of the Austrian Army.

Later Life

Russell took part in numerous BBC broadcasts on a variety of topical and philosophical topics, including The Brains Trust and the Third Programme. By this point, Russell was well-known outside of academic circles, often the topic or writer of articles in magazines and newspapers, and frequently asked for his thoughts on a wide range of topics, including mundane ones. Russell was one of 24 survivors—out of a total of 43 passengers—of an aircraft crash near Hommelvik in October 1948 while en route to one of his lectures in Trondheim. Given that those who perished were in the non-smoking section of the aircraft, he claimed that smoking was the reason he still lived. Russell's 1945 best-seller "A History of Western Philosophy" gave him a reliable source of income for the rest of his life.

Russell said in a 1948 speech that if the USSR persisted in its aggression, it would be morally worse to go to war after the USSR acquired an atomic weapon than it would have been before because the West would win faster and with fewer casualties if there were atomic bombs on both sides. The USSR was pursuing an extraordinarily aggressive posture towards the countries in Eastern Europe that were being integrated into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence at the time, and the only country with an atomic weapon was the United States. Nigel Lawson, who was there when Russell discussed such topics, was among many who interpreted his remarks to suggest that Russell supported the use of force to start a conflict with the Soviet Union. Others, such as Griffin (who managed to secure a transcript of the speech), contend that he was only outlining how America's atomic weapons could be used to prevent the USSR from retaining its hegemony over Eastern Europe.

But Russell sent letters shortly after the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between 1945 and 1948, he wrote articles for publications in which he unequivocally said that it was ethically right and preferable to use atomic bombs to wage war on the Soviet Union while the US possessed them and before the USSR did. A week after the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb in September 1949, but before this was made public, Russell claimed that the USSR would never be able to produce nuclear weapons because, after Stalin's purges, only Marxist science would be practiced in the USSR. Russell publicly said that he was in favor of the complete elimination of atomic weapons after it was revealed that the USSR had conducted nuclear bomb tests.

Russell received the Order of Merit on June 9, 1949, as part of the King's Birthday Honours. The following year, he was given the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Russell was present at the founding convention of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950. This was the first meeting of this CIA-funded anti-communist group, which was dedicated to using culture as a weapon in the Cold War. When Russell resigned from Congress in 1956, he was among its most well-known patrons.

Russell was quite unhappy with Spence, and the two got divorced in 1952. Russell's son Spence, Conrad, did not see his father from the time of the divorce until 1968, when meeting him broke his mother's heart forever. Shortly after the divorce, on December 15, 1952, Russell wed Edith Finch, his fourth wife. They had been friends since 1925. Edith had been a professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, which is located close to Philadelphia. She had lived in a house with Lucy Donnelly, an old friend of Russell's, for 20 years. They were married for a long, happy, and loving period, and Edith stayed with him until his death.

Last Years, Death, and Legacy

Russell and Edith moved into Plas Penrhyn, which they had rented in June 1955, as their main residence in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales, on July 5 of that same year.

In 1967, 1968, and 1969, Russell published his autobiography in three volumes. In the 1967 Indian release of the anti-war Hindi film Aman, directed by Mohan Kumar, Russell had a cameo role as himself. This was Russell's only appearance in a feature film.

He described the preparations for show trials in Czechoslovakia as "highly alarming" in a letter to The Times newspaper dated November 23, 1969. He also urged UN Secretary-General U Thant to back an international war crimes commission looking into claims of torture and genocide committed by the US in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. This request was made in the same month.

Russell released a statement on January 31, 1970, denouncing "Israel's aggression in the Middle East," specifically referring to Israeli bombing operations being conducted as part of the War of Attrition deep within Egyptian territory. He demanded that Israel leave its territory and return to its pre-Six-Day War boundaries. Russell's last deed or political declaration was this. The day after his passing, on February 3, 1970, in Cairo, it was read aloud to the International Conference of Parliamentarians.

On February 2, 1970, shortly after 8 p.m., Russell passed away at home in Penrhyndeudraeth from influenza. Later that year, his ashes were strewn over the Welsh highlands in accordance with his wishes, which called for no religious ceremony other than a minute of quiet. A committee led by philosopher A. J. Ayer commissioned a tribute to Russell in 1980. It is made up of a bust of Russell at London's Red Lion Square that Marcelle Quinton created.

The Bertrand Russell Society was established in 1974 by Russell's daughter, Lady Katharine Jane Tait, with the goal of conserving and promoting his writings. It hosts meetings, grants scholarships, and publishes the Bertrand Russell Society Bulletin. In addition, she wrote a book titled "My Father, Bertrand Russell," which was released in 1975, and other essays about her father.