Bertrand Russell Biography and List of Works

British philosopher, mathematician and social critic, and one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

"The belief that fashion alone should dominate opinion has great advantages. It makes thought unnecessary and puts the highest intelligence within the reach of everyone. It is not difficult to learn the correct use of such words as 'complex,' 'sadism,' 'Oedipus,' 'bourgeois,' 'deviation,' 'left'; and nothing more is needed to make a brilliant writer or talker."
(from 'On Being Modern-Minded' in Unpopular Essays, 1950)

Russell was born in Trelleck, Gwent, the second son of Viscount Amberley. His mother, Katherine, was the daughter of Baron Stanley of Aderley. She died of diptheria in 1874 and her husband died twenty months later. At the age of three Russell was an orphan. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, who had twice been prime minister and his wife Lady John, subsequently brought him up.

Inspired by Euclid's Geometry, Russell displayed a keen aptitude for pure mathematics and developed an interest in philosophy. At Trinity College, Cambridge, his brilliance was soon recognized, and brought him a membership of the 'Apostles', a forerunner of the Bloomsbury Set.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1894, Russell worked briefly at the British Embassy in Paris as honorary attaché. The following year he became a fellow of Trinity College. Against his family's wishes, Russell married an American Quaker, Alys Persall Smith, and departed with his wife to Berlin, where he studied economics and gathered data for the first of his ninety-odd books, GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY (1896). The following year saw the publication of Russell's fellowship dissertation, ESSAY ON THE FOUNDATIONS ON GEOMETRY (1897).

THE PRINCIPLES OF MATHEMATICS (1903) was Russell's first major work. It proposes that the foundations of mathematics can be deduced from a few logical ideas. In it Russell arrived at the view of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), that mathematics is a continuation of logic and that its subject matter is a system of Platonic essences that exist in the realm outside both mind and matter. PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA (1910-13) was written in collaboration with the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. According to Russell and Whitehead, philosophy should limit itself to simple, objective accounts of phenomena. Empirical knowledge was the only path to truth and all other knowledge was subjective and misleading. - Later however Russell became sceptical of the empirical method as the sole means for ascertaining the truth, and admitted that much of philosophy does depend on unprovable a priori assumptions about the universe.

After Principia Russell never again worked intensively in mathematics. His concise and original introductory book, THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, appeared in 1912. He continued with works on epistemology, MYSTICISM AND LOGIC (1918) and ANALYSIS AND MIND (1921).

In 1907 Russell stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Women's Suffragate Society, and in the following year he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Believing that inherited wealth was immoral, Russell gave most of his money away to his university. His marriage ended when he began a lengthy affair with the literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, a close friend of the Swedish writer and physician Axel Munthe (1857-1949). Other liaisons followed, including one with T.S. Eliot's wife Vivien Haigh-Wood. Later Russell wrote about his sexual morality and agnosticism in MARRIAGE AND MORALS (1929). Russell stated that human beings are not naturally monogamous, outraging many with his views. In 1927 Russell wrote in WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN that all organized religions are the residue of the barbaric past, dwindled to hypocritical superstitions that have no basis in reality.

At the outbreak of World War I, Russell's outspoken pacifisms lost him his fellowship in 1916. Two years later he served six months in prison, convicted of libelling an ally - the American army - in a Tribune article. While in Brixton Gaol, he worked on INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY (1919).

Ludwig Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's work on the theory of knowledge disturbed his philosophical self-confidence. He applied the tools of logical analysis to variety of subjects, including causation, perception, knowledge, truth, and the nature of philosophy. Russell visited Russia in 1920 with a Labour Party delegation and met Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, but returned deeply disillusioned and published his sharp critique THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF BOLSHEVISM (1920).

From the 1920s Russell lived by lecturing and journalism. He pursued his philosophical work in THE ANALYSIS OF MIND (1921) and THE ANALYSIS OF MATTER (1927). Between 1920 and 1921 he was professor at Peking and in 1927 he founded a progressive school at Beacon Hill, on the Sussex Downs with his former student and second wife Dora Black. In ON EDUCATION (1926) Russell called for an education that would liberate the child from unthinking obedience to parental and religious authority. The experiment at Beacon Hill lasted for five years and provided material for the book EDUCATION AND SOCIAL ORDER (1932).

In 1936 Russell married Patricia Spence, his research assistant on his political history FREEDOM AND ORGANIZATION (1934) In 1938 he moved to the United States. He was a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and later at City College, New York, where he was debarred from teaching because of libertarian opinions about sexual morals, education, and war. An appointment from the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia gave Russell an opportunity to write one of his most popular works, HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY (1945) Its success permanently ended his financial difficulties. In 1944 Russell returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of his old college, Trinity.

During WW II Russell abandoned his pacifism, but in the final decades of his life he became the leading figure in the antinuclear weapons movement. He established the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in 1964, supported the Jews in Russia and the Arabs in Palestine, and condemned the Vietnam War.

Retaining his ability to infuriate, Russell was imprisoned in 1961 with his fourth and final wife Edith Finch for taking part in a demonstration in Whitehall. The sentence was reduced on medical grounds to seven days in Brixton Prison.

Russell spent his final years in North Wales. Russell's later works include HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: ITS SCOPE AND LIMITS (1948), two collections of sardonic fables, SATAN IN THE SUBURB (1953) and NIGHTMARES OF EMINENT PERSONS (1954), and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL (1967-69, 3 vols.).

Russell died of influenza on February 2, 1970. When asked what he would say to God if he found himself before Him, Russell answered: 'I should reproach him for not giving us enough evidence.'

Though Russell was a pioneer of logical positivism, (which was further developed by such philosophers from the 'Vienna circle' as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap), he never identified himself fully with the group. In Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits Russell argued that while the data of the sense are mental, they are caused by physical events. The world is a vast collection of facts and events, but beyond the laws of their occurrence science cannot go, it only gives us knowledge of the world.

For further reading: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, ed. by P.A. Schilpp (1946); Bertrand Russell's Philosophy by L. Aiken (1963); Bertrand Russell on Education by J. Park (1963); Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy by D.F. Pears (1967); Russell by A.J. Ayer (1972); The Life of Bertrand Russell by R.W. Clark (1975); Russell by R.M. Sainsbury (1979); Bertrand Russell and His World by R.W. Clark (1981); Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War by J. Vellacott (1981); Bertrand Russell: A Political Life by A. Ryan (1988); Bertrand Russell by A. Brink (1989); Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy by P. Hylton (1990); Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship by N. Griffin (1991); The Mathematical Philosophy of Bertrand Russell by F.A. Rodriguez-Consuegra (1991); Bertrand Russell by C. Moorehead (1992); Russell and Analytic Philosophy by A.D. Irvine and G.A. Wedeking (1993); Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 by Ray Monk (1996); Life of Bertrand Russell by Ray Monk (1996) - Note: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) sent his first work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to Russell from Italy in 1918, where he had been taken prisoner on the front of WW I. Wittgenstein succeeded in 1939 G.E. Moore as professor of mental philosophy and logic in Cambridge, but resigned in 1947 and the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright was invited to succeed Wittgenstein.

GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, (1896)