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Bertrand Russell"

" Bertrand Russell once said, "The good life is one inspired by love and guided by

knowledge," (What I Believe, 40). It is safe to say he knew from experience. Bertrand

Russell was not only a great thinker but an activist and a winner of the Nobel Prize in

Literature."

" Later being known as a liberal but not "in any profound sense" (Russell,

Autobiography, 260), Russell was born into a liberal and influential family of the British

aristocracy. He had an older sister named Rachel and an even older brother named

Frank (Barrette). When Russell was two years old, his mother died of diphtheria,

followed shortly by his sister's death. Two years later, his father died of bronchitis

following a long period of depression. Bertrand and Frank Russell were placed were

placed in the care of their father's parents, and two years after that, Russell's

grandfather died. Russell's grandmother was the dominant family figure for the rest of

his youth. She successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in

his father's will that required the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her

conservative Presbyterianism, she had progressive views in other areas, and her

influence on Russell's outlook on social justice remained with him throughout his life.

Her favorite Bible verse, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil," (Standard English

Bible, Exodus 23:2) became his motto. In contrast, he did not like the reverent

atmosphere of his home. His adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated

Cody Mims"

Mrs. Mann"

DC English III"

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suicide. His desire for knowledge kept him alive. He once stated, "I did not, however,

commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics." (Russell,

Autobiography, 38) His tutors were his sole educators until he won a scholarship to

Trinity College, where he quickly distinguished himself in math and philosophy

("Bertrand Russell - Biographical"). He fell in love with his friend Alys Pearsall Smith,

and married her against his grandmother's wishes. Their marriage began to fall apart

when it occurred to him that he no longer loved her. His first published work was

German Social Democracy, a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong

interest in political and social theory. He taught a class of the same name at the London

School of Economics, where he also lectured on the science of power 41 years later.

While teaching, he started an intensive study of the foundations of math at Trinity. He

wrote An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, and two years later attended the

International Congress of Philosophy in Paris. There the Italians gave him some

literature, which he read upon returning to England, discovering Russell's paradox.

Three years later he published The Principles of Mathematics, which put forth a thesis

of logicism, the idea that math and logic are one in the same. When he was 29, he

underwent what he called a "sort of mythic illumination" (Autobiography, 149), after

seeing Alfred North Whitehead's wife suffer an angina attack. He later said that he found

himself filled with "a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some

philosophy which should make human life endurable." (149) Equally dramatically, he

said, "At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different

person." (149) Four years later he wrote the essay "On Denoting", which was published

in the philosophical journal Mind. Three years after that he became a Fellow of the

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Royal Society. Two years after that he became a lecturer in the University of Cambridge.

Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with Whitehead, was published in three volumes

between 1910 and 1913. Russell soon became world-famous in his field for Principia

Mathematica and The Principles of Mathematics. He travelled to Russia as part of an

official delegation by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian

Revolution, and met Vladimir Lenin and had an hour-long conversation with him

("Bertrand Russell"). His experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the

revolution, and he wrote a book called The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism about

the trip, which he took with 24 other people, who all came back thinking well of the

régime despite his attempts to change their minds. The following autumn Russell,

accompanied by his lover Dora Black, visited Peking (as it was then known in the West)

to lecture on philosophy for a year. Black was six months pregnant when the couple

returned to England. Russell arranged a hasty divorce from Pearsall Smith and married

Black six days after the divorce was finalized. Their children were John Conrad Russell,

4th Earl Russell, and Katharine Jane Russell, born two years later. Russell supported

his family during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics,

and education to the common man. He founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in

1927. Three years later, Black gave birth to her third child Harriet Ruth. After Russell left

the school two years later, she would continue it for eleven years. Their marriage had

been growing strained around the time Russell left the school, and shortly after reached

a breaking point over Black having two children with an American journalist. They

separated and finally divorced. Four years later, Russell married his third wife, Patricia

("Peter") Spence, who had been his children's governess for six years. Russell and

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Peter had one son, Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, 5th Earl Russell. Before World

War II, Russell taught at the University of Chicago, later moving on to Los Angeles to

lecture at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. He was appointed professor at the City

College of New York (CCNY) in 1940, but after a public outcry the appointment was

annulled by a court judgment that called him "morally unfit" to teach at the college due

to his opinions—notably those relating to sexual morality, detailed in his 1929 book

Marriage and Morals. The protest was started by the mother of a student who would not

have been eligible for his graduate-level course in mathematical logic. Many

intellectuals, led by John Dewey, protested the judgment. Albert Einstein's famous

quote, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds"

originated in his open letter to a professor emeritus at CCNY. Russell soon joined the

Barnes Foundation, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of philosophy. These

lectures later formed the basis of A History of Western Philosophy. He returned to

Britain in 1944 to rejoin the faculty of Trinity College. From then through the 1950s,

Russell participated in many BBC broadcasts, particularly The Brains Trust and the

Third Programme, on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this time Russell

was world-famous outside academic circles, frequently the subject or author of

magazine and newspaper articles, and was called upon to offer opinions on a wide

variety of subjects, even mundane ones. He said he owed his life to smoking after

surviving a plane crash in which 19 people died, since the people who drowned were in

the non-smoking part of the plane. The book he wrote in 1945, A History of Western

Philosophy, became a best-seller and provided him with a steady income for the rest of

his life. In 1948, Russell said in a speech that if the USSR's aggression continued, it

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would be morally worse to go to war after the USSR possessed an atomic bomb than

before it possessed one, because if the USSR had no bomb the West's victory would

come quicker and with fewer casualties than if there were atom bombs on both sides.

Later, the BBC invited him to deliver the first Reith Lectures—what was to become an

annual series of lectures, which continues to this day. His series of six broadcasts, titled

Authority and the Individual, explored themes such as the role of individual initiative in

the development of a community and the role of state control in a progressive society.

He continued to write about philosophy. The next year, in the King's Birthday Honours,

Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he received the Nobel

Prize in Literature. When he was given the Order of Merit, George VI was courteous but

slightly embarrassed at decorating an ex-prisoner, saying, "You have sometimes

behaved in a manner that would not do if generally adopted" (Clark, 94). Russell merely

smiled, but afterwards claimed that he immediately thought of the reply, "That's right,

just like your brother". Two years later he was divorced by Spence, with whom he had

been very unhappy. Conrad, his son with her, did not see his father until 16 years later.

Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, soon after the divorce. They had known

each other since 1925, when she had shared a house with his old friend. They stayed

together until his death, and their marriage was a happy and close one. His eldest son

John suffered from serious mental illness, which was the source of ongoing disputes

between him and his former wife Dora. John's wife was also mentally ill, and eventually

Russell and Finch became the legal guardians of their three daughters, two of whom

were later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Russell published a highly critical article

weeks before the Warren Commission Report was published, equating the Oswald case

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with the Dreyfus affair of late 19th-century France, in which the state wrongly convicted

an innocent man. He made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war Hindi

film Aman which was released in India in 1967. He published his three-volume

autobiography in from 1967 to 1969. Russell died of influenza in 1970. In accordance

with his will, there was no religious ceremony."

" Russell had an astounding life, but he is mostly considered an influential

philosopher for helping to develop what is now called "Analytic Philosophy". He has

been shown to be partly responsible, along with G. E. Moore, for the British revolt

against idealism. They both favored clarity in arguments and broke down philosophical

positions into their simplest components. Russell, in particular, saw formal logic and

science as the principal tools of the philosopher. He did not think there should be

separate methods for philosophy, and instead thought philosophers should strive to

answer the most general of propositions about the world. He especially wanted to cut

down on what he saw as the excesses of metaphysics. He adopted Occam's Razor as a

central part of his method of analysis. He was prolific in many other philosophical fields,

one of them being modern mathematical logic. After becoming familiar with the work of

the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano, he took it upon himself to find logical

definitions for the primitive axioms of Peano's set, which had not already been logically

defined. He became convinced that something that has now come to be known as

higher-order logic could be the key to the foundations of mathematics, and also believed

that it included a form of an unrestricted comprehension axiom. He then discovered that

Gottlob Frege had independently arrived at the same definitions for the primitive axioms

of Peano's set that Russell had arrived at. The definition of the word "number" is now

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typically referred to as the "Frege-Russell definition". It was in the appendix of Russell's

book The Principles of Mathematics that Russell first tried to resolve what would then

come to be known as the Russell Paradox. He was already aware of Cantor's proof that

there was no greatest Cardinal number, but he didn't believe it. The Cantor Paradox

actually turned out to be a special case of the Russell Paradox. This caused Russell to

analyze classes, and he discovered the class of all classes. It contains two kinds of

classes: those that contain themselves, and those that do not. This led him to find a

fatal flaw in the principle of comprehension, which logicians had been taking for granted.

He put forth the contradiction that Y is a member of Y, if and only if, Y is not a member

of Y (Derbyshire). This is Russell's paradox. Russell later developed this into a complete

theory, the Theory of types. His work exposed a major inconsistency in naive set theory

and led directly to the creation of modern axiomatic set theory, and much later became

practical in computer science and information technology. Principia Mathmatica

established what made mathematical and symbolic logic special more than any other

single work. Russell felt that his intellectual faculties never recovered from completing

the Principia. He also made a significant contribution to philosophy of language with his

theory of descriptions, laid out in On Denoting. Considering the sentence "The present

King of France is bald," Russell argued that the grammatical form of the sentence

disguises its underlying logical form. His Theory of Definite Descriptions enables the

sentence to be construed as meaningful but false. His influence remains strong in the

field of epistemology as he made the distinction between two ways we can be familiar

with objects: "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description". He also

wrote a great amount on ethics, but he did not believe that he did so as a philosopher.

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He agreed with his philosophical hero, David Hume, that ethical terms dealt with

subjective values that cannot be verified the same way as matters of fact."

" During World War I, Russell was one of very few people that engaged in active

pacifist activities, and in 1916 he was convicted under the Defence of the Realm Act

1914 and then dismissed from Trinity College. Russell played a significant part in the

Leeds Convention — a historic event which saw well over a thousand "anti-war

socialists" gather, united in their pacifist beliefs and advocating for a peace settlement.

He was later imprisoned for six months in Brixton prison for publicly lecturing against

inviting the U.S. to enter the war on Britain's side. While in prison, he read enormous

amounts, and wrote the book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. He was

reinstated as a Fellow the following year and resigned the year after. In 1961, at the age

of 89, Russell was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison for "breach of peace" after

taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London (Russell, "Civil disobedience").

The magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to "good

behaviour", and Russell refused. His final political act was issuing a statement

condemning "Israel's aggression in the Middle East"."

" All of this activism was important at the time, and Russell's ideas are still

important today. Gifted in a large list of philosophical fields and achieving many things

throughout his life, Bertrand Russell was nothing short of prolific.

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Works Cited"

Barrette, Paul. "Parents & Grandparents". The Bertrand Russell Gallery. McMaster "

" University. Web. 6 Mar 2015."

"Bertrand Russell". The Free Library. Farlex. Web. 5 Mar 2015."

"Bertrand Russell - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 26 Feb "

" 2015."

Clark, Ronald W. Bertrand Russell and His World. New York: Thames and Hudson, "

" 1981. Print."

Derbyshire, John. "Chasing down the ghost in the machine: losing consciousness in "

" Arizona." The American Spectator June 2014: 20+. Gale Biography In Context. "

" Web. 27 Feb. 2015."

Russell, Bertrand. Autobiography. Psychology Press, 1998. Print."

---. "Civil disobedience." New Statesman [1996] 8 Nov. 2013: 35+. Gale Biography In "

" Context. Web. 27 Feb. 2015."

---. What I Believe. Routledge, 2004. Print.