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Bertrand Russell

Bertrand 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 diphtheria in 1874. Her husband died twenty months later, after a long period of gradually increasing debility. Lord Amberley was a friend of John Stuart Mill - he was "philosophical, studious, unworldly, morose, and priggish," wrote Russell later in his autobiography. Katherine, whom Russell only knew from her diary and her letters, he described as "vigorous, lively, witty, serious, original, and fearless." When she died she was buried without any religious ceremony. At the age of three Russell was an orphan. He was brought up by his grandfather, Lord John Russell, who had been prime minister twice, and his wife Lady John.

Inspired by Euclid's Geometry, Russell displayed a keen aptitude for pure mathematics and developed an interest in philosophy. "I like precision," he once said. "I like sharp outlines. I hate misty vagueness." However, when he was about fourteen he become interested in theology, but during the following years he rejected free will, immortality, and belief in God. He read widely, mostly books from his grandfather's library, but it was only at Cambridge, when he started to read such "modern" writers of the early 1890s as Ibsen, Shaw, Flaubert, Walt Whitman, and Nitzsche. 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. Next year he became a fellow of Trinity College.

Against his family's wishes, Russell married an American Quaker, Alys Persall Smith, and went off with his wife to Berlin, where he studied economics and gathered data for the first of his ninety-odd books, GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY (1896). A year later Russell's fellowship dissertation, ESSAY ON THE FOUNDATIONS ON GEOMETRY (1897) came out. "It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps," Russell wrote in My Philosophical Development (1959).

THE PRINCIPLES OF MATHEMATICS (1903) was Russell's first major work. It proposed that the foundations of mathematics could 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. - However, later 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. He, however, maintained in contrast to Wittgenstein, that philosophy could and should deliver substantial results: theories about what exists, what can be known, how we come to know it.

After Principia Russell never again worked intensively in mathematics. Russell's interpretation of numbers as classes of classes was to give him much trouble: if we have a class that is not a member of itself - is it a member of itself? If yes, then no, if no, then yes. After discussions with Wittgenstein Russell accepted the view that mathematical statements are tautologies, not truths about a realm of logico-mathematical entities.

Russell's 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 his paper of 1905, 'On denoting', Russell showed how a logical form could differ from obvious forms of common language. The work was the foundation of much twentieth-century philosophizing about language. The essential point of his theory, Russell later wrote, "was that although 'the golden mountain' may be grammatically the subject of a significant proposition, such a proposition when rightly analysed no longer has such a subject. The proposition 'the golden mountain does not exist' becomes 'the propositional function "x is golden and a mountain" is false for all values of x'." (from My Philosophical Development)

In 1907 Russell stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Women's Suffragette Society, and the next 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, who had been a close friend of the Swedish writer and physician Axel Munthe (1857-1949). Other liaisons followed, among others 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. He also opposed existing laws against homosexuality and maintained that sexual relations between unmarried people are not morally wrong.

At the outbreak of World War I, Russell was an outspoken pacifist, which lost him his fellowship in 1916. At the beginning of the war, he helped orgazine a petition urging that Britain remain neutral. In 1918 Russell 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). World War I darkened Russell's view of human nature. "I learned an understanding of instinctive processes which I had not possessed before." Also Ludwig Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's work on the theory of knowledge disturbed his philosophical self-confidence. 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 criticism, THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF BOLSHEVISM (1920).

In 1922 Russell celebrated his 50th birthday, believing that "brain becomes rigid at 50." He was a famous and controversial figure - "'Bertie is a fervid egoist," Virginia Wollf wrote in her diary about her friend, but Russell saw himself as "a non-supernatural Faust." From about 1927 to 1938 Russell lived by lecturing and writing on a huge range of popular subjects. In 1927 he gave a lecture, 'Why I am not a Christian', in which he stated that "The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men." Russell' views were attacked by T. S. Eliot in his journal The Monthly Criterion. Eliot wrote that "Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity", and Russell's "non-Christianity is merely a variety of Low Church sentiment." Russell pursued his philosophical work in THE ANALYSIS OF MIND (1921) and THE ANALYSIS OF MATTER (1927). Between the years 1920 and 1921 he was professor at Peking, and in 1927 he started with his former student and second wife Dora Black a progressive school at Beacon Hill, on the Sussex Downs. In ON EDUCATION (1926) Russell called for an education that would liberate the child from unthinking obedience to parental and religious authority.