Bertrand Russell had a long and influential life as a philosopher, mathematician, and social activist. He was born into a wealthy British family but experienced immense personal tragedy as a child with the deaths of his parents and siblings. Russell went on to study mathematics and philosophy, developing influential ideas in logic and the foundations of mathematics. He taught at several universities and wrote extensively on social and political issues, experiencing censorship due to his controversial views. Russell received many honors for his work, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, before his death in 1970 at the age of 97.

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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"
3-6-2015

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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.