Bertrand Russell

Welsh philosopher and mathematician

• Born: May 18, 1872
• Birthplace: Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales
• Died: February 2, 1970
• Place of death: Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth, Wales

Russell’s original work in the areas of logic, mathematics, and the theory of knowledge was complemented by several important volumes of philosophical popularization. In his later years Russell emerged as a major figure in the peace movement.

Early Life

Bertrand Russell was born in Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales. His mother, née Kate Stanley, was the daughter of the second Baron Stanley of Alderley and a leader in the fight for votes for women; his father, Lord Amberley, was the eldest son of the first Earl Russell and a freethinker who lost his seat in Parliament because of his advocacy of birth control. Both parents were considered extremely eccentric, and both died before Russell reached the age of four. Russell and his older brother were brought up by their rigidly conventional paternal grandmother, and they spent a rather solemn childhood being educated at home by a succession of governesses and tutors.

At the age of eighteen, Russell entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where it did not take him long to make a positive impression. He was taken under the wing of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, with whom he would later collaborate on Principia Mathematica(1910-1913), and was much influenced by fellow student G. E. Moore (1873-1958), who helped him to develop his early ideas on the independent existence of what is perceived by the senses. In 1894, Russell married Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker five years older than he was, and in 1895 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College for his dissertation “An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry.” In the following year, he and his wife spent three months in the United States, thus beginning a lifelong interest in and involvement with American affairs.

In the late 1890’s, Russell achieved wide recognition as a professional philosopher of promise, as he subjected the dominant Idealist thought of the period to an increasingly rigorous critique. His personal life revolved around the strains of a deteriorating marriage, which in 1902 reached a crisis when Russell told his wife that he no longer loved her. Although they continued to live together until 1911, the pressures of conflict at home and a demanding professional career made this the most difficult period of Russell’s life. It was also, however, a very productive time for him, highlighted by the publication of perhaps his greatest single work: The Principles of Mathematics (1903), which took the groundbreaking step of removing metaphysical notions from the concept of numbers and arguing that logic alone could serve as the basis for a true science of mathematics. After the publication of this volume, even those who took issue with Russell’s views had to acknowledge his status as a major contributor to contemporary philosophical and mathematical thinking.

Russell’s striking personal appearance became part of the folklore of Cambridge. His tall, thin frame and sharply chiseled, almost hawkish facial lines were seldom observed at rest, as his penchant for vigorous intellectual disputation was matched by a passion for strenuous walking. Russell kept his distinctive looks to the end of his life, with the only significant change being a whitening of his full head of hair, which added a mature dignity to his craggy features. The heavy media coverage of his public appearances on behalf of the peace movement in the 1960’s reflected the charismatic appeal of his majestically leonine figure, which seemed to many observers to possess an almost biblical air of wisdom and authority.

Life’s Work

The decade preceding the outbreak of World War II found Russell achieving success as a professional philosopher and undertaking what would be the first in a tempestuous string of love affairs and marriages. His collaboration with Whitehead on the three volumes of Principia Mathematica developed the ideas touched on in The Principles of Mathematics into a coherent and influential formal system, and he was fruitfully stimulated by his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, who helped him to clarify his thoughts about the proper conduct of philosophical analysis. Russell’s growing interest in the theory of knowledge resulted in his The Problems of Philosophy (1912), the first in what would be a series of books concerned with such perennial philosophical issues as the nature of reality and the operations of the mind. In 1911, he began an intense love affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, which lasted until 1916 and put an end to his first marriage.

Russell was deeply affected by the horrors of World War I and found himself compelled to become active in the pacifist movement. His Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916) signaled a deepening involvement with questions of human relations, and his antiwar efforts led to his being fined in 1916, imprisoned for six months in 1918, and as a result deprived of his lectureship at Trinity College. In 1916 he met and in 1921 married his second wife, Dora Black, a fellow freethinker with whom he had two children and briefly ran an experimental school at Beacon Hill. A visit to postrevolutionary Russia produced The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920), in which he recorded his disillusionment with the gap between the Soviet Union’s promise and performance, and he became somewhat notorious for his advocacy of free love a doctrine he practiced in a string of extramarital affairs in the book Marriage and Morals (1929).

Russell continued to do serious work in philosophy during the interwar period, although his refusal to accept Trinity College’s offer of reinstatement meant that he had to spend more time writing financially profitable books and journalistic articles. Thus, popularly oriented titles such as The Conquest of Happiness (1930) and Education and the Modern World (1932) were interspersed with the more technical philosophical works Our Knowledge of the External World (1929) and An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), and Russell also became a popular lecturer on topics such as divorce, sexual relations, and pacifism. His personal life continued to be turbulent, as he divorced his second wife in 1935 and married his third, Patricia Spence, in 1936, to whom a son was born in the following year.

In 1938, Russell and his new family moved to the United States, where he held several university posts and made a number of extensive lecture tours. He was in continual difficulty as right-wing pressure groups attacked his liberal views, and in 1943 he even had to go to court to collect his salary from the outraged head of a charitable foundation. The main positive result of his American sojourn was History of Western Philosophy (1945), a popular success whose royalties would comfortably support him for the remainder of his life. The Russells returned to England in 1944, and he decided to accept a five-year lectureship at Trinity College and endeavor to settle down into a less hectic pattern of existence.

The award of the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 indicated that Russell’s achievements now commanded general respect. This did not, however, seem to have a stabilizing effect on his domestic life: He divorced his third wife in 1949 and married his fourth, Edith Finch, in 1952. Disappointed by the indifference of his academic colleagues to his last serious philosophical work, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), Russell devoted more and more time to antiwar activities. He helped to found the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958, organized its militant wing, the Committee of 100, in 1960, and was jailed for seven days for participating in a 1961 Whitehall sit-in. Although Russell’s physical powers now began to weaken, he remained an effective propagandist for the pacifist movement and in the late 1960’s was a prominent member of the international opposition to the U.S. presence in Vietnam. His final days were spent resting quietly at his home in northern Wales, where he died on February 2, 1970.

Significance

Russell brought keen intellectual perception to every task that fired his imagination. As a philosopher, he was instrumental in the development of modern analytical techniques; as a mathematician, he helped to anchor speculative hypotheses on the firm ground of formal logic; and as a political activist, he cut through the verbiage of politicians with a clarion call to abandon nuclear weapons before they produced a global holocaust. Although the content of his ideas has in some cases been rejected by subsequent commentators, there is an almost universal acknowledgment of his methodological contributions to his areas of academic specialization.

However, Russell was not merely a man with a great mind. His charismatic public persona and his ability to write for a general readership extended his influence into regions usually closed to the professional academic, and the range of his published work is extraordinarily impressive. His volatile emotional life also reflected the immense energy and appetite for new experiences that, in combination with his outstanding intellectual prowess, made Bertrand Russell one of the seminal figures of his time.

Bibliography

Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Examines Virginia Woolf’s involvement with Russell and the other members of the Bloomsbury Group to describe how they developed their concepts of modernism.

Feinberg, Barry, and Ronald Kasrils. Bertrand Russell’s America. Vol 1. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Vol. 2. Boston: South End Press, 1983. Traces Russell’s attitudes toward and experiences in the United States. The authors make extensive use of previously unpublished letters and essays and succeed in presenting a comprehensive account of what are often very dramatic and at times even amusing episodes in Russell’s career.

Griffin, Nicholas. The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Collection of essays analyzing various aspects of Russell’s work, including his mathematics, philosophy, and ideas about morality.

Jager, Ronald. The Development of Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy. New York: Humanities Press, 1973. An excellent study of Russell’s growth as a philosopher, aimed at general readers as well as specialists. Pays particular attention to the historical influences, ranging from Plato to Wittgenstein, that affected a thinker always conscious of the rich history of his discipline.

Nakhnikian, George, ed. Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Contains fourteen essays on various aspects of Russell’s thought, from logical issues to the theory of knowledge to political philosophy. Some essays assume a background in philosophy, but the majority should be accessible to nonspecialist readers. Includes an excellent bibliography.

Potter, Michael K. Bertrand Russell’s Ethics. New York: Continuum, 2006. Focuses on Russell’s ideas on ethics and how his ethics guided his social activism.

Roberts, George W., ed. Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume. New York: Humanities Press, 1979. Twenty-six essays assessing Russell’s achievements in philosophy, mathematics, ethics, and politics, from a distinguished group of contemporary scholars. The book is strongest on Russell’s philosophical accomplishments, although its exhaustive index makes it a good source of information on almost every facet of his career.

Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. 3 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967-1969. The judicious mixture of chronological narrative and extensive quotations from letters contributes to the impact made by this superb intellectual autobiography. On personal matters, the story needs to be fleshed out by the books by Clark and Tait, but for a fascinating account of the development of Russell’s thought there is no better source than these eminently readable volumes.

Tait, Katharine. My Father Bertrand Russell. 1975. New ed. Bristol, England: Thoemmes, 1996. Tait, Russell’s daughter by his second wife, concentrates on his failures as a father and demonstrates how his self-centeredness resulted in great pain for his family. A sensitive memoir that provides an unfamiliar angle on Russell as well as some implicit criticism of his educational and social theories. Includes a new introduction by Ray Monk.

Vellacott, Jo. Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. A welcome portrait of Russell at the beginning of his career as a political activist. The book provides much information about the origins of the pacifist movement in Great Britain, particularly its socialist and Quaker roots, and is very well researched and written.