Bertrand Russell

Western Philosophy Twentieth century philosophy
Name: Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Birth: May 18, 1872 Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom
Death: February 2, 1970 Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, United Kingdom
School/tradition: Analytic philosophy
Main interests
Ethics, epistemology, logic, mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, religion
Notable ideas
Logical atomism, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, Russell's paradox, Russell's teapot.
Influences	Influenced
Leibniz, Hume, G.E. Moore, Frege, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Mill	Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Willard Van Orman Quine

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (May 18, 1872 – February 2, 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, and mathematician, working mostly in the twentieth century. He and G. E. Moore are usually credited with being the founders of analytic philosophy. A prolific writer, Russell wrote works that were of interest to professional philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians, but especially in the second half of his life, he also wrote many other works directed at general readers and thereby became a popularizer of philosophy and a commentator on a large variety of topics, ranging from very serious issues to the mundane. Continuing a family tradition in political affairs, he was a prominent liberal, socialist, and anti-war activist for much of his long life. Millions looked up to Russell as a prophet of the creative and rational life, but, at the same time, his stances on many topics were extremely controversial. Religiously, he was an agnostic or an atheist strongly leaning towards materialism.

Russell was born at the height of Britain's economic and political ascendancy. He died of influenza nearly a century later, at a time when the British Empire had all but vanished, its power dissipated by two debilitating world wars. As one of the world's best-known intellectuals, Russell's voice carried great moral authority, even into his nineties. Among his political activities, Russell was a vigorous proponent of nuclear disarmament and an outspoken critic of the American war in Vietnam.

In 1950 Russell received the Nobel Prize in Literature, "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

His critics have pointed out inconsistencies in Russell's attacks on religion and religious values. For although he himself admittedly lacked a cogent system of moral values because of his basic philosophical skepticism about the world—which he saw as essentially in chaos, he attacked Christianity in particular as if he had a cogent system of his own as his criterion of judgment.

Biography

Bertrand Russell was born at Trellech, Monmouthshire, now in Wales, into an aristocratic English family (later, he would sometimes insist on being referred to as "Lord Russell"). His paternal grandfather, John Russell, the 1st Earl Russell, had been the British prime minister in the 1840s and 1860s, and was the second son of John Russell, the 6th Duke of Bedford. The Russells had been prominent for several centuries in Britain, and were one of Britain's leading Whig (Liberal) families. Russell's mother Kate (née Stanley) was also from an aristocratic family, and was the sister of Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle. Russell's parents were quite radical for their times—Russell's father, John Russell, Viscount Amberley, was an atheist and consented to his wife's adulterous affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian philosopher, was Russell's godfather.

Russell had two siblings: Frank Russell, the 2nd Earl Russell (nearly seven years older than Bertrand), and Rachel (four years older). In June 1875, Russell's mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel, and in January 1876 his father also died of bronchitis following a long period of clinical depression. Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of their staunchly Victorian grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. The first Earl Russell died in 1878, and his widow the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot) was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth. The countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned a British court to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule), and her influence on Russell's outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life. However, the atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression and formality—Frank reacted to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his feelings.

Russell's adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests were in sex, religion and mathematics, and that only the wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors, and he spent countless hours in his grandfather's library. His brother Frank introduced him to Euclid, which transformed Russell's life.

Russell won a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and commenced his studies there in 1890. He became acquainted with the younger G. E. Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating with a B.A. in the former subject in 1893 and adding a fellowship in the latter in 1895.

Russell first met the American Quaker, Alys Pearsall Smith, when he was seventeen years old. He fell in love with the puritanical, high-minded Smith, who was connected to several educationists and religious activists, and, contrary to his grandmother's wishes, he married her in December 1894. Their marriage began to fall apart in 1902 when Russell realized he no longer loved her; they divorced nineteen years later. During this period, Russell had passionate (and often simultaneous) affairs with, among others, Lady Ottoline Morrell and the actress, Lady Constance Malleson. Smith pined for him for these years and continued to love Russell for the rest of her life.

Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy, a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest in political and social theory. In 1896, he taught German social democracy at the London School of Economics, where in the autumn of 1937 he also lectured on the science of power.

Russell became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908. The first of three volumes of Principia Mathematica (written with Whitehead) was published in 1910, which (along with the earlier The Principles of Mathematics) soon made Russell world famous in his field. In 1911, he became acquainted with the Austrian engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose genius he soon recognized and whom he viewed as a successor who would continue his work on mathematical logic. Russell and Moore became Wittgenstein's examiners at Cambridge; they awarded him a Ph.D. based on the Tractatus. Russell spent hours dealing with Wittgenstein's various phobias and his frequent bouts of despair. The latter was often a drain on Russell's energy, but he continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development, including the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922; in fact, Russell wrote a preface to it.

During World War I, Russell engaged in pacifist activities, and, in 1916, he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act. A later conviction resulted in six months' imprisonment in Brixton prison.

In 1920 Russell traveled to Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Russell's lover, Dora Black, also visited Russia independently at the same time—she was enthusiastic about the revolution, but Russell's experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for it.

Russell subsequently lectured in Beijing on philosophy for one year, accompanied by Miss Black. While in China, Russell became gravely ill with pneumonia, and incorrect reports of his death were published in the Japanese press. When the couple visited Japan on their return journey, Black notified journalists that "Mr. Bertrand Russell, having died according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to Japanese journalists."

On the couple's return to England in 1921, Black was five months pregnant, and Russell arranged a hasty divorce from Smith, marrying Black six days after the divorce was finalized. Their children were John Conrad Russell, the 4th Earl Russell and Katharine Jane Russell (now Lady Katharine Tait). Russell supported himself during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics and education to the layman. Together with Dora, he also founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927. After he left the school in 1932, Dora continued it until 1943.

Upon the death of his elder brother Frank in 1931, Russell became the 3rd Earl Russell. He once said that his title was primarily useful for securing hotel rooms.

Russell's marriage to Dora grew increasingly tenuous, and it reached a breaking point over her having two children with an American journalist, Griffin Barry. In 1936 he took as his third wife a University of Oxford undergraduate named Patricia ("Peter") Spence, who had been his children's governess in the summer of 1930. Russell and Spence had one son, Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, the 5th Earl Russell, later to become a prominent historian, and one of the leading figures in the Liberal Democrat party of the UK.

In the spring of 1939, Russell moved to Santa Barbara, California, to lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York in 1940, but after a public outcry the appointment was annulled by a court judgment: his opinions (especially those relating to sexual morality, detailed in his book Marriage and Morals ten years earlier) made him "morally unfit" to teach at the college. The protest was started by the mother of a student who (as a woman) would not have been eligible for his graduate-level course in mathematical logic. Many intellectuals, led by John Dewey, protested his treatment. Dewey and Horace M. Kallen edited a collection of articles on the CCNY affair in The Bertrand Russell Case. He soon joined the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of philosophy - these lectures formed the basis of Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. His relationship with the eccentric Albert C. Barnes (the founder of the Barnes Foundation and the Barnes Gallery—one of the best but most eccentric private collections of art in the world) soon soured, and he returned to Britain in 1944 to rejoin the faculty of Trinity College.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Russell participated in many broadcasts over the BBC on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this time in his life, Russell was world famous outside of academic circles, frequently the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles, and was called upon to offer up opinions on a wide variety of subjects, even mundane ones. A History of Western Philosophy (1945) became a best-seller, and provided Russell with a steady income for the remainder of his life. Along with his friend Albert Einstein, Russell had reached superstar status as an intellectual. In 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1952 Russell was divorced by Peter, with whom he had been very unhappy. Conrad, Russell's son by Peter, did not see his father between the time of the divorce and 1968 (at which time his decision to meet his father caused a permanent breach with his mother). Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, soon after the divorce. They had known each other since 1925, and Edith had lectured in English at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sharing a house for 20 years with Russell's old friend Lucy Donnelly. Edith remained with him until his death, and, by all accounts, their relationship was close and loving throughout their marriage.

Russell's eldest son, John, suffered from serious mental illness, which was the source of ongoing disputes between Russell and John's mother and Russell's former wife, Dora. John's wife Susan was also mentally ill, and eventually Russell and Edith became the legal guardians of their son's three daughters (two of whom were later diagnosed with schizophrenia).

En route to one of his lectures in Trondheim, Russell survived a catastrophic plane crash in October 1948.

Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in various political causes, primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposition to the Vietnam War. He wrote a great many letters to world leaders during this period. He also became a hero to many of the youthful members of the "New Left." During the 1960s, in particular, Russell became increasingly vocal about his disapproval of the American government's policies. In 1963 he became the inaugural recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, an award for writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.

As detailed above, Russell was married four times and in addition had many love affairs and mistresses. In his autobiography he remarked that the search for love was for him a lifelong preoccupation.

Russell published his three-volume autobiography in the late 1960s. While he grew frail, he remained lucid until the end. In his autobiography, A. J. Ayer wrote of meeting Russell on Russell's 90th birthday; a picture of the two together is included. In 1970, Russell died in his home, Plas Penrhyn, Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth, Wales. His ashes, as his will directed, were scattered.

Russell's Philosophical Work

Logic and philosophy of mathematics

Russell had great influence on modern mathematical logic. The American philosopher and logician Willard Van Orman Quine said Russell's work represented the greatest influence on his own work.

Russell's first mathematical book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, was published in 1897. This work was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant. Russell soon realized that the conception it laid out would have made Albert Einstein's schema of space-time impossible, which he understood to be superior to his own system. Thenceforth, he rejected the entire Kantian program as it related to mathematics and geometry, and he maintained that his own earliest work on the subject was nearly without value.

Russell was interested in the definition of number and he studied the work of George Boole, Georg Cantor, and Augustus De Morgan, while materials in the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University include notes of his reading in algebraic logic by Charles S. Peirce and Ernst Schröder. He became convinced that the foundations of mathematics were tied to logic, and following Gottlob Frege took an extensionalist approach in which logic was in turn based upon set theory. This led Russell to accept and defend the view known as logicism, the view that mathematics is in some important way reducible to formal logic. In 1900 he attended the first International Congress of Philosophy in Paris where he became familiar with the work of the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano. He mastered Peano's new symbolism and his set of axioms for arithmetic. Peano was able to define logically all of the terms of these axioms with the exception of 0, number, successor, and the singular term, the. Russell took it upon himself to find logical definitions for each of these. Between 1897 and 1903 he published several articles applying Peano's notation to the classical Boole-Schröder algebra of relations, among them On the Notion of Order, Sur la logique des relations avec les applications à la théorie des séries, and On Cardinal Numbers.

Russell eventually discovered that Frege had independently arrived at equivalent definitions for 0, successor, and number, and the definition of number is now usually referred to as the Frege-Russell definition. It was largely Russell who brought Frege to the attention of the English-speaking world. He did this in 1903, when he published The Principles of Mathematics, in which the concept of class is inextricably tied to the definition of number. The appendix to this work detailed a paradox arising in Frege's set theory, now frequently called or known as naive set theory. That theory had formalized the intuition that any specifiable condition could be used to formulate a set or class. But Russell raised the question of the set of all sets that are not members of themselves—that set is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. This came to be known as the Russell Paradox.

In writing Principles, Russell came across Cantor's proof that there was no greatest cardinal number, which Russell believed was mistaken. The Cantor Paradox in turn was shown (for example by Crossley) to be a special case of the Russell Paradox. This caused Russell to analyze classes, for it was known that given any number of elements, the number of classes they result in is greater than their number. In turn, this led to the discovery of a very interesting class, namely, the class of all classes, which consists of two kinds of classes: classes that are members of themselves, and classes that are not members of themselves, which led him to find that the so-called principle of extensionality—the notion that any specifiable condition would determine a set or class—taken for granted by logicians of the time, was fatally flawed, and that it resulted in a contradiction, whereby Y is a member of Y, if and only if Y is not a member of Y.

Russell's solution to the Russell Paradox was outlined in an appendix to Principles, which he later developed into a complete theory, the Theory of Types. Aside from exposing a major inconsistency in any Frege-type set theory, usually called naive set theory, Russell's work led directly to the creation of modern set axiomatic set theory. It also crippled Frege's project of reducing arithmetic to logic. The Theory of Types and much of Russell's subsequent work have also found practical applications with computer science and information technology.

Russell continued to defend logicism, and along with his former teacher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica, an axiomatic system on which they claimed all of mathematics can be built. The first volume of the Principia was published in 1910, and is largely ascribed to Russell. More than any other single work, it established the specialty of mathematical or symbolic logic. Two more volumes were published, but their original plan to incorporate geometry in a fourth volume was never realized, and Russell never felt up to improving the original works, though he referenced new developments and problems in his preface to the second edition. Upon completing the Principia, three volumes of extraordinarily abstract and complex reasoning, Russell was exhausted, and he never felt his intellectual faculties fully recovered from the effort. Although the Principia did not fall prey to the paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by Kurt Gödel that neither Principia Mathematica, nor any other consistent system of primitive recursive arithmetic, could, within that system, determine that every proposition that could be formulated within that system was decidable, i.e. could decide whether that proposition or its negation was provable within the system (this is known as Gödel's incompleteness theorem).

Russell's last significant work in mathematics and logic, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, was written by hand while he was in prison for his anti-war activities during World War I. This was largely an explication of his previous work and its philosophical significance.

Analytic philosophy

Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, even of its several branches. At the beginning of the twentieth century, alongside G. E. Moore, Russell was largely responsible for the British "revolt against Idealism," a philosophy greatly influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his British apostle, F. H. Bradley. This revolt was echoed 30 years later in Vienna by the logical positivists' "revolt against metaphysics." Russell was particularly appalled by the idealist doctrine of internal relations, which held that in order to know any particular thing, one must know all of its relations. Russell showed that this would make space, time, science and the concept of number unintelligible. Russell's logical work with Whitehead continued this project.

Russell and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy, and they sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact language and by breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest components. Russell, in particular, saw logic and science as the principal tools of the philosopher. Indeed, unlike most philosophers who preceded him and his early contemporaries, Russell did not believe there was a separate method for philosophy. He believed that the main task of the philosopher was to illuminate the most general propositions about the world and to eliminate confusion. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of metaphysics. Russell adopted William of Ockham's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities; this principle, known as Ockham's Razor, as a central part of the method of analysis.

Epistemology

Russell's epistemology went through many phases. Once he shed neo-Hegelianism in his early years, Russell remained a philosophical realist for the remainder of his life, believing that our direct experiences have primacy in the acquisition of knowledge. While some of his views have lost favor, his influence remains strong in the distinction between two ways in which we can be familiar with objects: "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description." For a time, Russell thought that we could only be acquainted with our own sense data—momentary perceptions of colors, sounds, and the like—and that everything else, including the physical objects that these were sense data of, could only be inferred, or reasoned to—i.e. known by description—and not known directly. This distinction has gained much wider application, though Russell eventually rejected the idea of an intermediate sense datum.

In his later philosophy, Russell subscribed to a kind of neutral monism, maintaining that the distinctions between the material and mental worlds, in the final analysis, were arbitrary, and that both can be reduced to a neutral property—a view similar to one held by the American philosopher, William James, and one that was first formulated by Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly admired. Instead of James' "pure experience," however, Russell characterized the stuff of our initial states of perception as "events," a stance which is curiously akin to his old teacher Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy.

Ethics

While Russell wrote a great deal on topics in ethics, he did not believe that the subject belonged to philosophy, or that when he wrote on ethics he did so in his capacity as a philosopher. In his earlier years, Russell was greatly influenced by G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Along with Moore, he then believed that moral facts were objective but only known through intuition, that they were simple properties of objects, not equivalent (e.g., pleasure is good) to the natural objects to which they are often ascribed (see Naturalistic fallacy), and that these simple, undefinable moral properties cannot be analyzed using the non-moral properties with which they are associated. In time, however, he came to agree with his philosophical hero, David Hume, who believed that ethical terms dealt with subjective (personal and cultural) values that cannot be verified in the same way that matters of fact are. Coupled with Russell's other doctrines, this influenced the logical positivists, who formulated the theory of emotivism, which states that ethical propositions (along with those of metaphysics) were essentially meaningless and nonsensical or, at best, little more than expressions of psychological attitudes and preferences. Notwithstanding his influence on them, Russell himself did not construe ethical propositions as narrowly as the positivists, for he believed that ethical considerations are not only meaningful, but that they are a vital subject matter for civil discourse. Indeed, although Russell was often characterized as the patron saint of rationality, he agreed with Hume, who said that reason ought to be subordinate to ethical considerations: "Reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions" (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part I).

Russell wrote some books about practical ethical issues such as marriage. His book Marriage and Morals, even though it can be accused of being shallow and having more weaknesses than strengths, must be acknowledged as one of the very few works on this topic ever written by an Anglo-American philosopher. His opinions on this field were liberal. He argued that sexual relationships outside of marriages are acceptable. In his book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), he advocated the view that we should see moral issues from the point of view of the desires of individuals. Individuals are allowed to do what they desire, as long as there are no conflicting desires among different individuals. Desires are not bad, in and of themselves, but on occasion, their potential or actual consequences are. Russell also wrote that punishment is important only in an instrumental sense; thus, we should not punish someone solely for the sake of punishment.

Logical atomism

Perhaps Russell's most systematic, metaphysical treatment of philosophical analysis and his empiricist-centric logicism is evident in what he called "Logical atomism," which is explicated in a set of lectures, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," which he gave in 1918. In these lectures, Russell sets forth his concept of an ideal, isomorphic language, one that would mirror the world, whereby our knowledge can be reduced to terms of atomic propositions and their truth-functional compounds.

Logical atomism is a form of radical empiricism, for Russell believed the most important requirement for such an ideal language is that every meaningful proposition must consist of terms referring directly to the objects with which we are acquainted, or that they are defined by other terms referring to objects with which we are acquainted. Russell excluded certain formal, logical terms such as all, the, and is from his isomorphic requirement, but he was never entirely satisfied about our understanding of such terms. One of the central themes of Russell's atomism is that the world consists of logically independent facts, a plurality of facts, and that our knowledge depends on the data of our direct experience of them. In his later life, Russell came to doubt aspects of logical atomism, especially his principle of isomorphism, though he continued to believe that the process of philosophy ought to consist of breaking things down into their simplest components, even though we might not ever fully arrive at an ultimate atomic fact.

Philosophy of language

Russell was not the first philosopher to suggest that language had an important bearing on how we understand the world; however, more than anyone before him, Russell made language, or more specifically, how we use language, a central part of philosophy. Had there been no Russell, it seems unlikely that philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson, among others, would have embarked upon the same course, for so much of what they did was to amplify or respond, sometimes critically, to what Russell had said before them, using many of the techniques that he originally developed. Russell, along with Moore, shared the idea that clarity of expression is a virtue, a notion that has been a touchstone for philosophers ever since, particularly among those who deal with the philosophy of language.

Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language is his "theory of descriptions," as presented in his seminal essay, "On Denoting," first published in 1905, which the mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey described as "a paradigm of philosophy." The theory is normally illustrated using the phrase "the present king of France," as in "The present king of France is bald." What object is this proposition about, given that there is not, at present, a king of France? (Roughly the same problem would arise if there were two kings of France at present: which of them does "the king of France" denote?). Alexius Meinong had suggested that we must posit a realm of "nonexistent entities" that we can suppose we are referring to when we use expressions such as this; but this would be a strange theory, to say the least. Frege, employing his distinction between sense and reference, suggested that such sentences, although meaningful, were neither true nor false. But some such propositions, such as "If the present king of France is bald, then the present king of France has no hair on his head," seem not only truth-valuable, but indeed obviously true.

The problem is general to what are called "definite descriptions." Normally this includes all terms beginning with "the," and sometimes includes names, like "Walter Scott." (This point is quite contentious: Russell sometimes thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called names at all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much subsequent work has treated them as altogether different things.) What is the "logical form" of definite descriptions: how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them in order to show how the truth of the whole depends on the truths of the parts? Definite descriptions appear to be like names that by their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more or less. What, then, are we to say about the proposition as a whole if one of its parts apparently isn't functioning correctly?

Russell's solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term alone but the entire proposition that contained a definite description. "The present king of France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each definite description in fact contains a claim of existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the obvious content of the proposition. The proposition as a whole then says three things about some object: the definite description contains two of them, and the rest of the sentence contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be false, not meaningless.

One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does. Strawson also claims that a denoting phrase that does not, in fact, denote anything could be supposed to follow the role of a "Widgy's inverted truth-value" and expresses the opposite meaning of the intended phrase. This can be shown using the example of "The present king of France is bald." Taken with the inverted truth-value methodology the meaning of this sentence becomes, "It is true that there is no present king of France who is bald" which changes the denotation of 'the present king of France' from a primary denotation to a secondary one.

Wittgenstein, Russell's student, later achieved considerable prominence in the philosophy of language. Russell thought Wittgenstein's elevation of language as the only reality with which philosophy need be concerned was absurd, and he decried his influence and the influence of his followers, especially members of the so-called "Oxford school" of ordinary language philosophy, who he believed were promoting a kind of mysticism. Russell's belief that there is more to philosophy and knowing the world than simply understanding how we use language has regained prominence in philosophy and eclipsed Wittgenstein's language-centric views.

Philosophy of science

Russell frequently claimed that he was more convinced of his method of doing philosophy, the method of analysis, than of his philosophical conclusions. Science, of course, was one of the principal components of analysis, along with logic and mathematics. While Russell was a believer in the scientific method, knowledge derived from empirical research that is verified through repeated testing, he believed that science reaches only tentative answers, and that scientific progress is piecemeal, and attempts to find organic unities were largely futile. Indeed, he believed the same was true of philosophy. Another founder of modern philosophy of science, Ernst Mach, placed less reliance on method, per se, for he believed that any method that produced predictable results was satisfactory and that the principal role of the scientist was to make successful predictions. While Russell would doubtless agree with this as a practical matter, he believed that the ultimate objective of both science and philosophy was to understand reality, not simply to make predictions.

The fact that Russell made science a central part of his method and of philosophy was instrumental in making the philosophy of science a full-blooded, separate branch of philosophy and an area in which subsequent philosophers specialized. Much of Russell's thinking about science is exposed in his 1914 book, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. Among the several schools that were influenced by Russell were the logical positivists, particularly Rudolph Carnap, who maintained that the distinguishing feature of scientific propositions was their verifiability. This contrasted with the theory of Karl Popper, also greatly influenced by Russell, who believed that their importance rested in the fact that they were potentially falsifiable.

It is worth noting that outside of his strictly philosophical pursuits, Russell was always fascinated by science, particularly physics, and he even authored several popular science books, The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925).

Russell's influence on philosophy

It would be difficult to overstate Russell's influence on modern philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world. While others were also influential, notably, Frege, Moore, and Wittgenstein, more than any other person, Russell made analysis the dominant approach to philosophy. Moreover, he is the founder or, at the very least, the prime mover of its major branches and themes, including several versions of the philosophy of language, formal logical analysis, and the philosophy of science. The various analytic movements throughout the last century all owe something to Russell's earlier works.

Russell's influence on individual philosophers is singular, and perhaps most notably in the case of Wittgenstein, who was his student between 1911 and 1914. It should also be observed that Wittgenstein exerted considerable influence on Russell, especially in leading him to conclude, much to his regret, that mathematical truths were purely tautological truths. Evidence of Russell's influence on Wittgenstein can be seen throughout the Tractatus, which Russell was instrumental in having published. Russell also helped to secure Wittgenstein's doctorate and a faculty position at Cambridge, along with several fellowships along the way. However, as previously stated, he came to disagree with Wittgenstein's later linguistic and analytic approach to philosophy, while Wittgenstein came to think of Russell as "superficial and glib," particularly in his popular writings. Russell's influence is also evident in the work of A. J. Ayer, Rudolph Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Willard Van Orman Quine, and a number of other philosophers and logicians.

Some see Russell's influence as mostly negative, primarily those who have been critical of Russell's emphasis on science and logic, the consequent diminishment of metaphysics, and of his insistence that ethics lies outside of philosophy. Russell's admirers and detractors are often more acquainted with his pronouncements on social and political matters, or what some (e.g., Ray Monk) have called his "journalism," than they are with his technical, philosophical work. Among non-philosophers, there is a marked tendency to conflate these matters, and to judge Russell the philosopher on what he himself would certainly consider to be his non-philosophical opinions. Russell often cautioned people to make this distinction.

Russell left a large assortment of writing. Since adolescence, Russell wrote about three thousand words a day, in long hand, with relatively few corrections; his first draft nearly always was his last draft, even on the most complex, technical matters. His previously unpublished work is an immense treasure trove, and through it scholars are continuing to gain new insights into Russell's thought.

Russell's Views on Religion

Russell's ethical outlook and his personal courage in facing controversies were certainly informed by his religious upbringing, principally by his paternal grandmother, who instructed him with the biblical injunction, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil" (Exodus 23:2), something he said influenced him throughout his life. As a young man, Russell still had a religious bent, as is evident in his early Platonism. He longed for eternal truths, as he makes clear in his famous essay, "A Free Man's Worship," widely regarded as a masterpiece in prose, but one that Russell came to dislike because of its Platonic tone. Despite that, the conclusion of the essay already showed his basic inclination towards metaphysical materialism and nihilism based on a notion of chance: "Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way." That is why the conclusion of the essay also encourages us to invigorate the free man's worship "to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life."

In his adult life, therefore, Russell thought it very unlikely that there was a god (although as an undergraduate he did conclude for a short time that the ontological argument is sound), and he maintained that religion is little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects that religion might have, it is largely harmful to people. He believed religion and the religious outlook (he considered communism and other systematic ideologies to be species of religion) serve to impede knowledge, foster fear and dependency, and are responsible for much of the war, oppression, and misery that have beset the world. He, therefore, suggested that a free man should exercise his reasoning ability without submitting to religious dogma. These views of Russell on religion can be found in his popular book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects whose title essay was a talk given March 6, 1927, at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, UK. The speech was published later that year as a pamphlet, which, along with other essays, was eventually published as a book.

In the book, Russell refutes a number of logical arguments for the existence of God, including the natural-law argument, the God's Arguments for the Existence of The_Teleological Argument, and moral arguments. He also goes into specifics about Christian theology. His final conclusion:

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. … A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. (Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects.)

In his 1949 speech, "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?", Russell expressed his difficulty over whether to call himself an atheist or an agnostic:

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods. (Collected Papers, vol. 11, 91)

Russell also made a philosophically influential analysis of the "omphalos hypothesis" enunciated by Philip Henry Gosse—that any argument suggesting that the world was created as if it were already in motion, could just as easily make it a few minutes old as a few thousand years:

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. (The Analysis of Mind. (1921), 159–160; cf. Philosophy, (Norton, 1927), 7, where Russell acknowledges Gosse's paternity of this anti-evolutionary argument.)

This does not mean Russell was speaking as a creationist. He was either agnostic or atheistic. He was simply indicating his position of philosophical skepticism that what one perceives about the world cannot be used as valid evidence.

Russell's Activism

Political and social activism occupied much of Russell's time for most of his long life, which makes his prodigious and seminal writing on a wide range of technical and non-technical subjects all the more remarkable.

Russell remained politically active to the end, writing and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. Some maintain that during his last few years he gave his youthful followers too much license and that they used his name for some outlandish purposes that a more attentive Russell would not have approved. There is evidence to show that he became aware of this when he fired his private secretary, Ralph Schoenman, then a young firebrand of the radical left. A. J. Ayer has noted how much influence Schoenman had on Russell and how this interfered with the ability of other interested people, such as Ayer, to approach or even appreciate Russell during these years.

Pacifism, war and nuclear weapons

While never a complete pacifist (in "The Ethics of War," an article published in 1915, Russell argued on utilitarian grounds that wars of colonization were legitimate where the side with the stronger culture could put the land to better use), Russell opposed British participation in World War I. As a result, he was first fined, then lost his professorship at Trinity College of the University of Cambridge, and was later imprisoned for six months. In 1943 Russell called his stance "relative political pacifism"—he held that war was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances (such as when Adolf Hitler threatened to take over Europe) it might be a lesser of multiple evils. In the years leading to World War II, he supported the policy of appeasement; but by 1940 he acknowledged that in order to preserve democracy, Hitler had to be defeated.

Russell was opposed to the use and possession of nuclear weapons for most of their existence, but he may not have always been of that opinion. On November 20, 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Russell shocked some observers with comments that seemed to suggest a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union might be justified. Russell apparently argued that the threat of war between the United States and the Soviet Union would enable the United States to force the Soviet Union to accept the Baruch Plan for international atomic energy control (earlier in the year he had written in the same vein to Walter W. Marseille). Russell felt this plan "had very great merits and showed considerable generosity, when it is remembered that America still had an unbroken nuclear monopoly." (Has Man a Future?, 1961)

However, Nicholas Griffin of McMaster University, in his book The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, has claimed (after obtaining a transcript of the speech) that Russell's wording implies he didn't advocate the actual use of the atom bomb, but merely its diplomatic use as a massive source of leverage over the actions of the Soviets. Griffin's interpretation was slammed by Nigel Lawson, the former British Finance Minister, who was present at the speech and who claims it was quite clear to the audience that Russell was advocating an actual "first strike." Whichever interpretation is correct, Russell later relented, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear powers, possibly linked to some form of world government.

In 1955 Russell released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, co-signed by Albert Einstein and nine other leading scientists and intellectuals, which led to the first of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957. In 1958 Russell became the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He resigned two years later when the CND would not support civil disobedience, and formed the "Committee of 100." In 1961, when he was in his late eighties, he was imprisoned for a week for inciting civil disobedience, in connection with protests at the Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom and London's Hyde Park.

Russell made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war Bollywood film Aman, which was released in India in 1967. This was Russell's only appearance in a feature film.

The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation began work in 1963, in order to carry forward Russell's work for peace, human rights and social justice. He opposed the Vietnam War and, and along with Jean-Paul Sartre, he organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes; this came to be known as the Russell Tribunal.

Russell was an early critic of the official story in the John F. Kennedy assassination; his "16 Questions on the Assassination" from 1964 is still considered a good summary of the apparent inconsistencies in that case.

Communism and socialism

Russell visited the Soviet Union and met Vladimir Lenin in 1920, and on his return wrote a critical tract, "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism." He was unimpressed with the result of the communist revolution, and said he was "infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere—stifled by its utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse." He believed Lenin to be similar to a religious zealot, cold and possessed of "no love of liberty."

Politically, Russell envisioned a kind of benevolent, democratic socialism, similar in some ways to yet possessing important differences with the conception promoted by the Fabian Society. He was strongly critical of Stalin's regime, and of the practices of states proclaiming Marxism and communism generally. Russell was a consistent enthusiast for democracy and world government, and advocated the establishment of a democratic international government in some of the essays collected in In Praise of Idleness (1935), and also in Has Man a Future? (1961).

One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm. (The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920)

For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race. ("The Case for Socialism," In Praise of Idleness, 1935)

Women's suffrage

As a young man, Russell was a member of the Liberal Party of the UK and wrote in favor of free trade and women's suffrage. In his 1910 pamphlet, "Anti-Suffragist Anxieties," Russell wrote that some men opposed suffrage because they "fear that their liberty to act in ways that are injurious to women will be curtailed." In 1907 he was nominated by the National Union of Suffrage Societies to run for Parliament in a by-election, which he lost by a wide margin.

Sexuality

Russell wrote against Victorian notions of morality. Marriage and Morals (1929) expressed his opinion that sex between a man and woman who are not married to each other is not necessarily immoral if they truly love one another, and advocated "trial marriages" or "companionate marriage," formalized relationships whereby young people could legitimately have sexual intercourse without being expected to remain married in the long term or to have children (an idea first proposed by Judge Ben Lindsey). It was enough to raise vigorous protests and denunciations against him during his visit to the United States shortly after the book's publication. Russell was also ahead of his time in advocating open sex education and widespread access to contraception. He also advocated easy divorce, but only if the marriage had produced no children—Russell's view was that parents should remain married but tolerant of each other's sexual infidelity if they had children. This reflected his life at the time—his second wife Dora was openly having an affair, and would soon become pregnant by another man, but Russell was keen for their children John and Kate to have a "normal" family life.

Russell's private life was even more unconventional and freewheeling than his published writings revealed, but that was not well known at the time. For example, philosopher Sidney Hook reports that Russell often spoke of his sexual prowess and of his various conquests.

Eugenics and race

Some critics of Russell have pointed out racist passages in his early writings, as well as his initial praise for the then-fashionable idea of eugenics. For example, in early editions of his book Marriage and Morals (1929) he asserted:

In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another…. It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable. (Marriage and Morals, 1929)

Later in his life, Russell criticized eugenic programs for their vulnerability to corruption, and, by 1932, he was to condemn the "unwarranted assumption" that "Negroes are congenitally inferior to white men" (Education and the Social Order, Ch. 3). Racism rapidly declined in acceptance throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, Russell seems to have been one of the leaders of change in this sphere. He wrote a chapter on "Racial Antagonism" in New Hopes for a Changing World (1951):

It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions. (New Hopes for a Changing World, 1951, 108)

There is a much later condemnation-in-passing of racism in Russell's "16 Questions on the Assassination" (1964), in which he mentions "Senator Russell of Georgia and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana … whose racist views have brought shame on the United States."

Comments about Russell

• His appearance

"It is impossible to describe Bertrand Russell except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter."

—Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953).

• As a man

"Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man."

—A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell (New York: Viking Press, 1972).

• As a philosopher

"It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Russell's thought dominated twentieth century analytic philosophy: virtually every strand in its development either originated with him or was transformed by being transmitted through him. Analytic philosophy itself owes its existence more to Russell than to any other philosopher."

—Nicholas Griffin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

• As a writer and his place in history

"Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings."

—Sidney Hook, Out of Step, An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Carol & Graff, 1988).

"Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red—and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue—and no one should be allowed to read them."

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Rush Rhees, Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford Paperbacks, 1984).

• As a mathematician and logician

Of the Principia: "...its enduring value was simply a deeper understanding of the central concepts of mathematics and their basic laws and interrelationships. Their total translatability into just elementary logic and a simple familiar two-place predicate, membership, is of itself a philosophical sensation."

—Willard Van Orman Quine, From Stimulus to Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

• As an activist

"Oh, Bertrand Russell! Oh, Hewlett Johnson! Where, oh where, was your flaming conscience at that time?"

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Harper & Row, 1974).

• As a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"In other words, it was specifically not for his incontestably great contributions to philosophy—The Principles of Mathematics, "On Denoting," and Principia Mathematica—that he was being honoured, but for the later work that his fellow philosophers were unanimous in regarding as inferior.

—Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970 (New York: Free Press, 2001), 332.

• From a daughter

"He was the most fascinating man I have ever known, the only man I ever loved, the greatest man I shall ever meet, the wittiest, the gayest, the most charming. It was a privilege to know him, and I thank God he was my father."

—Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 202.

Assessment of Russell

There is no doubt that Russell was a serious truth-seeker, as is evident from his "A Free Man's Worship" (1903). To seek truths in this world which he perceived materialistically to be a world of chance, he courageously relied upon the "shrine" a free mind can build for worship. This yielded his academic work of exceptional brilliance in mathematics, logic, and philosophy.

But, Christian critics of Russell have observed that, as a philosophical skeptic, he could not say with certainty that his "shrine" was able to present a reasonable, cogent, and sure worldview. They have questioned whether he had a clear standard of judgment by which to criticize religious worldviews. Thus, the American conservative Presbyterian apologist Greg Bahnsen, in his article on "Apologetics in Practice,"complains of Russell: "In criticizing Christians for their views of ultimate reality, of how we know what we know, and of how we should live our lives, did Bertrand Russell have a defensible alternative from which to launch his attacks? Not at all." Bahnsen points out another, similar inconsistency in Russell. If according to Russell our ideals and values are merely subjective, relative, fleeting and doomed to destruction in face of a valueless universe of chance, how could he definitively make such negative moral judgments about Jesus and Christianity, to the effect that Jesus was morally inferior to Buddha and Socrates, and that Christianity is "the principal enemy of moral progress in the world"? What is Russell's moral criterion?

Still another inconsistency in Russell was pointed out by the British historian Paul Johnson in his Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky. While Russell was basically a pacifist based upon an ethic of love he came up with through his free mind of reason, he did not practice it consistently. For example, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s Russell repeatedly suggested a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, although he later backed down from it. Also in his relationships with his fellow humans, he is reported to have exploded emotionally, hurting them, again contrary to his ideal of love. This problem is said also to have been the case with his complicated relationships with his many wives and mistresses. Johnson explains this discrepancy, by saying that Russell's value system "rested on shaky foundations."

In the second half of his life, Russell got actively involved in social, political, moral and religious issues. He addressed them from a system of values and ideals he believed he reached. Many of his remarks were prophetic, controversial, and sometimes extreme, and they attracted millions of people during the times of turmoil in the world. According to Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921-1970, however, regardless of his tremendous popularity in the second half of his life, Russell ended up living a life of "tragedy" and "madness" because many problems occurred including the mental illness of some of his own children.

Nevertheless, Russell should still be treated as a bold thinker and activist in search of truth. He eventually admitted his failure to help the world conquer war and to win his perpetual intellectual battle for eternal truths, and he wrote this in "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday," which also served as the last entry in the last volume of his autobiography, published in his 98th year:

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

Quotations

• "War does not determine who is right. Only who is left."
• "The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible" (Source: Alan Wood, Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic, 1957).
• "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
• "You could tell by his [Aldous Huxley's] conversation which volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he'd been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath." (Source: Parris, M., Scorn: With Added Vitriol, London: Penguin, 1996, quoting Russell's 1963 letter to Ronald W. Clark)
• "Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."
• "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
• "And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence."
• "A Tale of Two Moralities" "I dislike Nietzsche," Russell wrote, "because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die." (Source: History of Western Philosophy, chap. on Nietzsche, last par.)

Bibliography - Primary Sources

Books

This is a selected bibliography of Russell's books in English sorted by year of first publication.

• 1896, German Social Democracy, London: Longmans, Green.
• 1897, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, Cambridge: At the University Press.
• 1900, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Cambridge: At the University Press.
• 1903, The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge: At the University Press.
• 1910, Philosophical Essays, London: Longmans, Green.
• 1910–1913, Principia Mathematica (with Alfred North Whitehead), 3 vols., Cambridge: At the University Press.
• 1912, The Problems of Philosophy, London: Williams and Norgate.
• 1914, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing.
• 1916, Principles of Social Reconstruction, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1916, Justice in War-time, Chicago: Open Court.
• 1917, Political Ideals, New York: The Century Co.
• 1918, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: Longmans, Green.
• 1918, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1919, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1920, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, London: George Allen & Unwin
• 1921, The Analysis of Mind, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1922, The Problem of China, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1923, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (in collaboration with Dora Russell), London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1923, The ABC of Atoms, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
• 1924, Icarus, or the Future of Science, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
• 1925, The ABC of Relativity, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
• 1925, What I Believe, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
• 1926, On Education, Especially in Early Childhood, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1927, The Analysis of Matter, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
• 1927, An Outline of Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1927, Why I Am Not a Christian, London: Watts.
• 1927, Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell, New York: Modern Library.
• 1928, Sceptical Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1929, Marriage and Morals, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1930, The Conquest of Happiness, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1931, The Scientific Outlook, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1932, Education and the Social Order, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1934, Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1935, In Praise of Idleness, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1935, Religion and Science, London: Thornton Butterworth.
• 1936, Which Way to Peace?, London: Jonathan Cape.
• 1937, The Amberley Papers: The Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley (with Patricia Russell), 2 vols., London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press.
• 1938, Power: A New Social Analysis, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1940, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• 1945, A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, New York: Simon and Schuster.
• 1948, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1949, Authority and the Individual, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1950, Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1951, New Hopes for a Changing World, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1952, The Impact of Science on Society, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1953, Satan in the Suburbs and Other Stories, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1954, Human Society in Ethics and Politics, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1954, Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1956, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1956, Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950 (edited by Robert C. Marsh), London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1957, Why I Am Not A Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (edited by Paul Edwards), London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1958, Understanding History and Other Essays, New York: Philosophical Library.
• 1959, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1959, My Philosophical Development, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1959, Wisdom of the West ("editor," Paul Foulkes), London: Macdonald.
• 1960, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company.
• 1961, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell (edited by R.E. Egner and L.E. Denonn), London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1961, Fact and Fiction, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1961, Has Man a Future?, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1963, Essays in Skepticism, New York: Philosophical Library.
• 1963, Unarmed Victory, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1965, On the Philosophy of Science (edited by Charles A. Fritz, Jr.), Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
• 1967, Russell's Peace Appeals (edited by Tsutomu Makino and Kazuteru Hitaka), Japan: Eichosha's New Current Books.
• 1967, War Crimes in Vietnam, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1967–1969, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols., London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1969, Dear Bertrand Russell... A Selection of his Correspondence with the General Public 1950–1968 (edited by Barry Feinberg and Ronald Kasrils), London: George Allen and Unwin.

Articles, etc.

Russell authored many pamphlets, introductions, articles and letters to the editor. His works also can be found in any number of anthologies and collections, perhaps most notably, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, which McMaster University began publishing in 1983. This collection of his shorter and previously unpublished works is now up to 16 volumes, and many more are forthcoming. An additional 3 volumes catalogue just his bibliography. The Russell Archives at McMaster University also have more than 30,000 letters that he wrote.

• 1900, “Sur la logique des relations avec des applications à la théorie des séries,” Rivista di matematica 7: 115-148.
• 1901, “On the Notion of Order,” Mind 10: 35-51.
• 1902, (with Alfred North Whitehead), “On Cardinal Numbers,” American Journal of Mathematics 23: 367-384.

Bibliography - Secondary Souces

Biographical books

• Ayer, A. J. Bertrand Russell. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1988. ISBN 0226033430
• Clark, Ronald W. Bertrand Russell and His World. Thames & Hudson, 1981. ISBN 0500130701
• Clark, Ronald W. The Life of Bertrand Russell. Knopf, 1976. ISBN 0394490592
• Lewis, John. Bertrand Russell: Philosopher and Humanist. International Publishers, 1968.
• Monk, Ray. Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872–1920. New York: Free Press, 1996. ISBN 0224030264
• Monk, Ray. Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970. New York: Free Press, 2001. ISBN 0743212150
• Tait, Katharine. My Father Bertrand Russell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Books about Russell's philosophy

• Ayer, A. J. Russell. London: Fontana, 1972. ISBN 0006329659. A lucid summary exposition of Russell's thought.
• Griffin, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521631785
• Irvine, A. D., ed. Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments. 4 volumes. London: Routledge, 1999. Consists of essays on Russell's work by many distinguished philosophers.
• Johnson. Paul M. Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky. Harper Perennial, 1990. ISBN 0060916575
• Slater, John. Bertrand Russell. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994.
• Schilpp, P. A., ed. The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell..Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University, 1944.

Others

• Crossley, John Newsome. "A Note on Cantor's Theorem and Russell's Paradox.” Australian Journal of Philosophy 51: 70-71.
• Grattan-Guinness, Ivor. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton University Press, 2000.

External Links

All links retrieved Bertrand Russell

Writings available online

• Mysticism
• "A Free Man's Worship" (1903)
• Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?
• Political Ideals
• The Analysis Of Mind
• The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
• The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
• Bertrand Russell, Project Gutenberg

Others

• A number of entries on Russell, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Pembroke Lodge - childhood home and museum
• The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
• Bertrand Russell in Japan
• Biography and quotes of Bertrand Russell
• The Bertrand Russell Archives

General Philosophy Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Paideia Project Online
• Project Gutenberg

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1926-1950)

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