Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970)

Bertrand Russell was born into the English aristocracy and went on to become an outstanding philosopher, public intellectual, and social activist. His parents died when Russell was very young, and he was brought up by his widowed grandmother. He studied at Cambridge University and, along with his colleague G. E. Moore (1873–1958), was instrumental in overturning the prevailing orthodoxy of Hegelianism in English philosophy at the time. His early works of philosophy, in particular The Principles of Mathematics (1903), had a profound effect on trends in logic and in understanding the importance of language.

The most productive years of Russell's life as a philosopher were devoted to producing, with Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), the monumental three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), which was designed to show that pure mathematics follows from logical premises and uses only concepts that are definable in logical terms. This project was never completed, as the proposed fourth volume never appeared. This was due partly to the authors' exhaustion and partly to growing doubts as to the validity of what was being attempted. As Kurt Gödel went on to show, at a certain point the inexorable logic of some mathematical propositions was less clear than originally supposed. And Ludwig Wittgenstein had persuaded Russell that some of the demon-strably logical mathematical demonstrations were little more than tautologies. As Russell said late in his life: “I think that the timelessness of mathematics has none of the sublimity that it once seemed to me to have, but consists merely in the fact that the pure mathematician is not talking about time.” Nevertheless, the Principia remains one of the most daunting monuments to raw intellectual power ever produced.

It was during the First World War that Russell felt the need to write a new sort of book, one that could extend beyond academic philosophy to reach the general citizen. The first of these works was Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), a series of lectures on issues surrounding postwar reconstruction. This book was enormously successful and established a wider audience for Russell than philosophers had hitherto thought possible, or desirable. During this time Russell lost his position at Cambridge, due largely to a campaign led byj. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925), who opposed his pacifist views. Russell went to prison for several months in 1918 for his opposition to the war.

The most important of the later technical works were Analysis of Mind (1921) and Analysis of Matter (1927), An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth (1940) and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948). The themes that were constant in Russell's work were analytical method, empiricism, realism, and the relations between things. The best of his popular writings are The Scientific Outlook (1931), Religion and Science (1936) History of Western Philosophy (1946), and Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays (1957). Russell's mathematical ability meant he had a clearer understanding of relativity than most philosophers, then or now. He put this to good effect in popular accounts like the ABC of Relativity (1925).

An important element of Russell's writing, particularly in his general works, was his focus on placing humanity squarely back in nature. He outlined this development in a late essay, revealingly tided “The Retreat from Pydiagoras.” His departure from pure mathematics was an important component of diat “retreat.” Part of his strong opposition to Kant, Hegel, and pragmatism lay in his suspicion that, in dieir various ways, they were attempting to place humanity back at the center of the universe, thus reversing die trajectory begun by Copernicus. Russell did not say anything fundamentally new about time, but he did take seriously his responsibility to incorporate time, as understood since Einstein, into a naturalistic outlook on life. The Idealism of Kant and Hegel, as well as [Page 1121]pragmatism, struck Russell as variations of hubris. So too did notions of personal immortality, which struck him as “aristocratic.” Instead, he pleaded, mainly rhetorically, for a life of moderation in matters intellectual alongside a capacity for extremes of feeling and compassion.

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