Born
in Trelleck, Wales, on May 18, 1872, Russell was educated at Trinity College,
University of Cambridge. After graduation in 1894, he
traveled
in France, Germany, and the United States and was then made a fellow of Trinity
College. From an early age he developed a strong sense of social consciousness;
at the same time, he involved himself in the study of logical and mathematical
questions, which he had made his special fields and on which he was called to
lecture at many institutions throughout the world. He achieved prominence with
his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics (1902), in which he
attempted to remove mathematics from the realm of abstract philosophical notions
and to give it a precise scientific framework.
Russell
then collaborated for eight years with the British philosopher and mathematician
Alfred North White head to produce the monumental work
Principia
Mathematica
(3 volumes, 1910-1913). This
work showed that mathematics could be stated in terms of the concepts of general
logic, such as class and membership in a class. It
became a masterpiece of rational thought. Russell and Whitehead proved that
numbers can be defined as classes of a certain type, and in the process they
developed logic concepts and a logic notation that established symbolic logic as
an important specialization within the field of philosophy. In his next major
work, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Russell borrowed from the fields
of sociology, psychology, physics, and mathematics to refute the tenets of
idealism, the dominant philosophical school of the period, which held that all
objects and experiences are the product of the intellect. Russell, a realist,
believed that objects perceived by the senses have an inherent reality
independent of the mind.
Russell condemned both sides in World War
I (1914-1918), and for his uncompromising stand he was fined, imprisoned, and
deprived of his teaching post at Cambridge. In prison he wrote Introduction
to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), combining the two areas of knowledge he
regarded as inseparable. After the war he visited the Russian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic, and in his book Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
(1920) he expressed his disappointment with the form of socialism practiced
there. He felt that the methods used to achieve a Communist system were
intolerable and that the results obtained were not worth the price
paid.
Russell
taught at Beijing University in China during 1921 and 1922. From 1928 to 1932,
after he returned to England, he conducted the private, highly progressive
Beacon Hill School for young children. From 1938 to 1944 he taught at various
educational institutions in the United States. He was barred, however, from
teaching at the College of the City of New York (now City College of the City
University of New York) by the state supreme court because of his attacks on
religion in such works as What I Believe (1925) and his advocacy of
sexual freedom, expressed in Manners and Morals
(1929).
Russell
returned to England in 1944 and was reinstated as a fellow of Trinity College.
Although he abandoned pacifism to support the Allied cause in World War II
(1939-1945), he became an ardent and active opponent of nuclear weapons. In 1949
he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI. Russell received the 1950
Nobel Prize for Literature and was cited as "the champion of humanity and
freedom of thought." He led a movement in the late 1950s advocating unilateral
nuclear disarmament by Britain, and at the age of 89 he was imprisoned after an
antinuclear demonstration. He died on February 2,
1970.
In addition to his earlier work, Russell
also made a major contribution to the development of logical positivism, a
strong philosophical movement of the 1930s and 1940s. The major Austrian
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, at one time Russell's student at Cambridge, was
strongly influenced by his original concept of logical atomism. In his search
for the nature and limits of knowledge, Russell was a leader in the revival of
the philosophy of empiricism in the larger field of epistemology. In Our
Knowledge of the External World (1926) and Inquiry into Meaning and
Truth (1962), he attempted to explain all factual knowledge as constructed
out of immediate experiences. Among his other books are The ABC of
Relativity (1925), Education and the Social Order (1932), A
History of Western Philosophy (1945), The Impact of Science upon
Society (1952), My Philosophical Development (1959), War Crimes in
Vietnam (1967), and The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (3 volumes,
1967-1969).