MacTutor
Bertrand Russell
Times obituary
Philosopher who sought involvement with problems of the age
Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., died last night at his home Plas Penrhyn, Merionethshire. He was 97.
Bertrand Russell's claim to be remembered by history rests securely on his work in mathematical and symbolic logic and in philosophy, on which his influence was pervasive and profound. The story of symbolic logic and of the philosophy of mathematics in the twentieth century is the story of the expansion of the edifice which Russell and Frege founded. There have been major reconstructions, but they are reconstructions from within. In general philosophy, when we think of G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein as shapers of the thought of our half-century, we are thinking of men who were fired by Russell and themselves gave Russell fire. There exist no disciples of Russell. Instead there exist scores of inquiring philosophers driven by questions which Russell was the first to ask. For Russell not only combined the hardihood of the extremist with the candour of the artist: he also had a lively sense of the ridiculous. So, if there were logical absurdities latent inside his own abstract constructions, he exposed them with cheerful callousness. The incongruities which he would not hide have become the cruces of philosophy.
Russell looked every inch a Russell and had all the "crankiness" of a Russell. He spoke his mind with Olympian disregard of the censure he might incur from established persons or received opinions or, for that matter, the law, which twice committed him to prison. He was throughout his life an ornament and an acquisition to a variety of public causes, generally of an unpopular kind. Into the last and for him the greatest of these, unilateral nuclear disarmament, he threw himself, now in his mid-eighties, with unabated fervour, seized withthe mission of rousing his fellow men to the peril in which they stood. He was obsessed by the enormity of the evil of which these weapons could be the instrument. In the intensity of his denunciation and the galvanic activity of his failing powers there came to be less and less room for sober assessment of the political means of deliverance from the doom so vividly before his mind.
He was the intellectual in the twenty-first century who, perhaps, before all others in this country, solved the problem of communications. Russell found a way of communicating with ordinary men and explored it to the full, especially and deliberately, in his later life. There was nothing new in the method. He merely expressed lucid thoughts in lucid style. But how few of the thinkers or artists who were contemporary with him could do half much!
Equally important, he could use not just terms of language but terms of reference which were intelligible to ordinary men and women because they were inside their experience. Here was a man of uncommon ancestry, uncommon intellectual brilliance, uncommon habits of mind and behavior, who was yet at case in addressing common men—and they were at ease in listening to him. The answer is to be found in the paradox that he yet shared a common ancestry with them. His thought was English to the core. He dallied with Hegelianism when he was at Cambridge, but no one with his roots so firmly in English thought and in England—Whig England—at that time could have long remained an apostle of Hegel.
The Right Honourable Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, was born at Ravenscroft, near Tintern, in Monmouthshire on May 18, 1872. He was the second son of Viscount Amberley and grandson of Lord John Russell, who had been created Earl Russell at the end of his long political life. His mother was Katherine, daughter of the second Lord Stanley of Alderley. He was as much a Russell as his elder brother, the second Earl, was a Stanley. In his appearance, his artistic qualities, and his versatility the Russell genius found expression. Russell would have been the first to admit that much of his life was determined by his early years, which were not calculated to produce a conventional citizen. His father and mother had converted from orthodoxy to agnosticism before his birth. But his mother died when he was two, his father when he was three, and he was placed under the care of his grandmother, "a Puritan with the moral rigidity of the Covenanters," as he called her, who maintained a gloomy theism at Pembroke Lodge. His father had directed that the two children should be brought up agnostics and had appointed two free-thinkers as guardians, but the direction was set aside in court and the children made wards in Chancery.
When he went to Cambridge, Bertrand Russell lived (not very happily) and was educated by governesses and tutors, at home. Cambridge was his first release into the outside world, a new world", as he said, "of infinite delight", and of friends such as Lowes Dickinson, Dr. Trevelyan, McTaggart, and G. E. Moore. The last two cast their spell over him. Under J. M. F. McTaggart's influence he became for some time a Hegelian, or, more precisely, a Bradleian. but Moore, whose influence on the whole of that Cambridge generation was so profound and so fortunate, broke Hegel's spell. Russell had gone to Trinity College as a scholar in 1890, but was only bracketed seventh Wrangler in 1893. His relatively low position may be explained by the fact that mathematics interested him not so much for his own sake as for being an example of certain knowledge: his interest was philosophical, The following year he took a First Class in the Moral Science Tripos with exceptional distinction. On going down from Cambridge he spent some months as honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Paris, and later made a study in Berlin of social and economic questions which bore fruit early in 1896 in six lectures on German Social Democracy for the London School of Economics. But the political career which seemed marked out for him by his heritage was abandoned-if he had ever seriously considered it in favour of the greater interest in laying afresh the foundations of mathematics, and his later resumptions of political interest were always, until nearer the end of his life, rather desultory.
In 1895 he had been elected a lecturer at Trinity, and in 1896 he lectured in America on non-Euclidean geometry. He published an Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, and then his training in mathematics and philosophy led him to study the thinker in whom their work was most perfectly exemplified. His Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, a work of great distinction, was published in 1900, his first major work. It set a higher estimate on Leibniz's thought than was usual at the time—an estimate he never altered, describing Leibniz, in his History of Western Philosophy, as "one of the supreme intellects of all time." Russell's judgment was, of course, founded on his recognition of Leibniz as "a pioneer in mathematical logy, of which he perceived the importance when no one else did." This was the field in which Russell was to do his most revolutionary work, and in outlook as well as in achievement he resembled Leibniz closely.
In 1900, at a mathematical con-gress in Paris, Russeil drew attention to the works of Peano, and in 1903 to those of Frege at the time the two most immediate influences on his thought. It was their explorations and those of Leibniz which led him in 1903 to give to the world his Principles of Mathematics, whose purpose was "first, to show that all mathematics follows from symbolic logic, and, secondly, to discover, as far as possible, what are the prin-ciples of symbolic logic itself". The Principles of Mathematics was intended to be a first volume to be followed by a second giving a deduc-tive exposition of results. This task was in fact carried out in a separate work in collaboration with A. N. Whitehead. Their Principia Mathematica was begun in 1900 and completed 10 years later in three volumes, which were published in 1910, 1912, and 1913 respectively. It was republished. with a new introduction, in 1925 and in successful years. The Royal Society, into whose Fellowship Russell had been admitted in 1908, made a grant towards publication from the Government fund. Of its composition Russeli later wrote: "My intellect never quite recovered from the strain. I have ever since been definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before."
Principia Mathematica is one of the decisive books in the history of both mathematics and logic. More completely and satisfactorily than in any previous work, the reduction of mathematics to a branch of logic was effected. In the course of the reduction, a new symbolism of great logical power in skilled hands was developed. It was the use of this power which was Russell's most enduring contribution to philosophical thought and the most constant feature of all his philosophical writings. He himself called his contribution "Logical Atomism," and it is a term which does justice to his skill and perception in logical analysis—his attempt to break down complex ideas into, if not simple, at least irrefutable components.
The details of Russell's achievement, which allows one, without the least exaggeration—in terms of British thought at least to talk of pre-Russell and post-Russell philosophy—are the concern of the student of philosophy. But even the layman can comprehend the value of freeing logical analysis from the tyranny of ordinary grammar or syntax. "The utility of philosophical syntax in relation to traditional problems is very great—such is his own modest estimate of his achievement late in his life."
The point is best illustrated by a summary of one of his most important discoveries, the theory of descriptions criptions, first developed in On Denoting, published in Mind in 1905. Such phrases as "The present President of the United States" have caused a lot of fruitless distress to philosophers trying to find the meaning of existence. "Suppose I say 'The golden mountain does not exist.' And suppose you ask "What is the golden mountain? It would seem that, if I say 'It is the golden mountain', I am attributing some sort of existence to it." In the two phrases "The golden mountain does not exist" and "The round square does not exist," the only difference lies in the words "The golden mountain" and "The round square implying that the one is one thing and the other another. Although neither exists. It was this problem which Russell sought to meet by the theory of descriptions. The statement "Scott was the author of Waverley" is, by this theory, interpreted as saying: There is an entity e such that the statement 'x wrote Waverley is true if x is e and false otherwise: moreover c is Scott." Thus "The golden mountain does not exist" means: "There is no entity e such that x is golden and mountainous is true when x is c but not otherwise." Existence", therefore, can only be asserted of descriptions. Russell was scarcely putting his claim too high when he said of the theory that it "clears up two millennia of muddle-headedness about 'existence', beginning with Plato's Theaetetus".
In 50 years of philosophical writing Russell used the destructive power of this logical technique to examine the traditional problems and traditional philosophies, and the mere use of the technique, however acceptable or unacceptable his conclusions, was a source of clarification and enlightenment, particularly in his analysis of relations, classes, continuity, infinity, and language forms. His progressive extension of methodological doubt into every field of philosophical inquiry is his most lasting monument. The incorporation of mathematics and the development of a powerful logical technique were, as he himself said, what distinguished his modern analytical empiricism from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Empirical knowledge and deductive knowledge were the only two kinds of knowledge which Russell was prepared to admit. He sought answers to the problems of philosophy which had the quality of science rather than philosophy. He admitted that there might be problems to which science and the intellect could not find the answers, but he refused to admit that there was any other way, intuitive or otherwise, by which the answers could be found.
Russell's empiricism is perhaps the most valid quality in his erratic and usually popular intrusions into Liberal political philosophy. He was no political philosopher. But a man born with the blood of the Russells in his veins could hardly avoid carrying the spirit of Locke in his head. "The only philosophy," he wrote in Philosophy and Politics in 1947, that affords a theoretical justification of democracy and that accords with democracy in its temper of mind, is empiricism. Locke, who may be regarded as the founder of empiricism, makes it clear how closely this is connected with his views on liberty and toleration. From this, Russell argued that the essence of the Liberal view lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held; instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively. It cannot be said that he himself followed this precept in all his public utterances.
In 1907 he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a woman suffrage candidate at Wimbledon. But it was the 1914-18 War which was to find an outlet for his unsatisfied impulse to do good. Without hesitation he flung himself wholeheartedly into the pacifist campaign. The unhappy results made him a national storm-centre and need be only summarily recalled. In The Times he avowed the authorship of a pamphlet for for the No-Conscription Fellowship and was duly fined £100 at the Mansion House and removed, with petty illiberality, from his lectureship at Trinity College. His library there was seized to pay the fine. In the autumn of that year, 1916, he was due to lecture at Harvard, but it was made known to the Harvard authorities that the British Government did not consider it in the public interest to issue a passport enabling bim to leave the country.
In September of the same year, he was forbidden from entering any prohibited area, and a little later, a book, Justice in Wartime, in which he likened the warring nations to the fighting of dogs angered by each other's smell, caused great resentment. Finally, in February 1918, he was sentenced at Bow Street to six months' imprisonment for having, in the organ of the No-Conscription Fellowship, made comments on the American Army "intended and likely to prejudice his Majesty's relations with the United States." On appeal, the sentence was ordered to be served in the first division instead of the second. It was while he was in prison that he wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.
After the war, he allowed his mind to range over almost the whole gamut of human studies. A visit to Russia in 1920 with the British Labour delegation left him unimpressed by the "military dictatorship" of the Bolsheviks. He immediately uttered his first warning of what Bolshevism really was—in his Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, and he remained a critic of Soviet communism even during the 1939-45 War, when Russia's popularity was at its height. His Analysis of Mind was the book of some lectures given in London and was published in 1921. Meanwhile, in 1920, he went to China for a brief period as Professor of Philosophy at Peking. It led to the publication of The Problem of China, a peg on which he hung his animus against Western and Japanese civilization, On Returning from China he stood unsuccessfully in 1922 and 1923 as a Labour candidate for Chelsea. Between the ABC of Atoms (1923) and the ABC of Relativity (1925), both beautifully lucid expositions, was sandwiched The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, written in collaboration with his second wife,
In 1927 their interest in education led them to establish a school near Petersfield where a large measure of licence was allowed to the children; in 1934 his wife removed it to Hertfordshire. He wrote two books on the subject, On Education in 1926 and Education and the Social Order in 1932; in them modern tendencies were carried to exaggerated lengths. Between these books appeared The Analysis of Matter, a magnificent review of modern physics, with more questionable metaphysical deductions. Other books followed: An Outline of Philosophy, Sceptical Essays, Marriage and Morals, and The Conquest of Happiness. In his books on social and ethical questions Russell mixed with his sometimes revolutionary ethics some wise advice. He could not write a chapter which, however unacceptable his conclusions, did not contain some provoking, stimulating, or penetrating observation. He certainly, in such offerings, often wrote trivially on weighty matters, throwing away sense for the sake of a jest or a paradox. But they had a more serious intent, and the perceptive reader could usually find and profit by it.
In 1934, he published his most considerable work outside the realms of logic and philosophy. Freedom and Organization traced the main causes of political, economic, and social change in Europe and America during the nineteenth century. It foreshadowed his monumental History of Western Philosophy by its attempt to see ideas in the context of the age which gave them birth. But it was quite different in construction from the later work, being more of a synthesis than an analysis, and it contained some of his most sparkling writing.
Russell, during the thirties, was being profoundly influenced by the rise of Hitler, confessing to a Fabian gathering that it had almost persuaded him to become a Christian. But although the success of such an irrational force as Hitlerism shook, as with so many others, so many of his rationalist predispositions, and made him abandon pacifism, and although he sought (but failed) to analyse the nature of power in a popular book, he lacked the political equipment to achieve a satisfactory statement of the twentieth-century's political problem. This was apparent in the Reith lectures which he delivered in 1948-49 on Authority and the Individual. He chose the wrong subject on which to speak, but he left no doubt of his ability to relate complex ideas to ordinary men's everyday experience.
During the later years of his life, Russell was in some danger of becoming a popular, a revered, even a respectable figure. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, and the year before had been given the O.M. In 1953, the man who had once been judicially proclaimed unfit to hold an academic chair at a certain American university was elected a bonorary associate of the New York National Institute of Arts and Letters. His could have been the serene old age of a tame philosopher, a domesticated sage, publicly honoured, listened to with affection and respect, vouchsafing the occasional quip often enough and sharp enough to keep alive the legend of the rebel.
He chose otherwise. There still echoes in the memory of a broadcast he gave in 1954 after the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, his thin, sing-song voice charged with the detached intensity of a prophet: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise: if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death." It was the warning he was to reiterate, with a rising pitch of stridency, until the end of his life.
He assisted at the birth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in February 1958 and became its president. Before and after that, he strove to mobilize the opinions of scientists in support of his views. In September 1960, impatient of the law-abiding methods of C.N.D. and finding its chairman, Canon Collins, "impossible to work with," he branched out with the Committee of 100 "for civil disobedience against nuclear warfare." The disobedience proved to be of a fairly orderly kind, and Russell, who was then 88, continued to speak for the campaign up and down the country, to issue urgent statements to the press, and to stage public demonstrations to the extent that his health allowed. He also made a practice of sending admonitory telegrams to world leaders, notably at the height of the Cuban crisis in October 1962
His defiance of authority again led to 10 imprisonment. In September 1961, he was summoned with others of the Committee of 100 for inciting members of the public to commit a breach of the peace—a forthcoming sit-down demonstration in Parliament Square. Having refused to be bound over to be of good behavior, he was sentenced to two months' imprisonment, a term which the magistrates reduced to seven days after representations by Russell's counsel. He served the sentence in Brixten Prison, with which he had become acquainted 43 years before
He chose otherwise. There still echoes in the memory of a broadcast he gave in 1954 after the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, his thin, sing-song voice charged with the detached intensity of a prophet: "Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise: if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death." It was the warning he was to reiterate, with a rising pitch of stridency, until the end of his life.
He assisted at the birth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in February 1958 and became its president. Before and after that, he strove to mobilise the opinions of scientists in support of his views. In September 1960, impatient of the law-abiding methods of C.N.D. and finding its chairman, Canon Collins, "impossible to work with," he branched out with the Committee of 100 "for civil disobedience against nuclear warfare." The disobedience proved to be of a fairly orderly kind, and Russell, who was then 88, continued to speak for the campaign up and down the country, to issue urgent statements to the press, and to stage public demonstrations to the extent that his health allowed. He also made a practice of sending admonitory telegrams to world leaders, notably at the height of the Cuban crisis in October 1962.
His defiance of authority again led to imprisonment. In September 1961, he was summoned with others of the Committee of 100 for inciting members of the public to commit a breach of the peace—a forthcoming sit-down demonstration in Parliament Square. Having refused to be bound over to be of good behavior, he was sentenced to two months' imprisonment, a term which the magistrates reduced to seven days after representations by Russell's counsel. He served the sentence in Brixton Prison, with which he had become acquainted 43 years before.
At the beginning of 1963 Russell resigned the presidency of the Committee of 100, stating among his reasons that he had become occupied with work of a different kind, although directed towards the same end. And later in the year he announced the launching of two foundations, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Atlantic Peace Foundation, whose purpose was to develop international resistance to the threat of nuclear war. In his last years he lived in growing isolation at Plas Penrhyn, his country home in North Wales. His dealings with the outside world were conducted by his secretary Mr. Ralph Shoenman; while his public undertakings to which he attached his name became increasingly bizarre -- like his international war crimes tribunal, in which a bench of celebrated intellectuals were to try the United States in absentia on charges arising out of its policies in Vietnam. After some difficulty over a venue, the tribunal held its first session in Stockholm, and returned a unanimous verdict of Guilty.
These controversial activities, inspiring to some, misdirected or ridiculous to others, obscured in his final years the extraordinary achievements of his long life; his influence on philosophy and, something the general public had better reason to remember, his genius as a popularizer of unfamiliar or difficult ideas. He retained the style which puts him in the company of Berkeley and Hume, who adorned literature as well as philosophy. Whether he wrote in symbols or in words he was equally dextrous and equally happy. His clear-cut antitheses, his magnificent self-assurance, his polished ruthlessness of argument, his dazzling paradoxes, his wit and gaiety are the envy of all others who try to write. When passion intruded, when the Whig possessed the philosopher, his writing must be ranked with the noblest in the language. He was equally a master of the microphone and gave several memorable series of broadcasts after the war. His vignettes of some of his eminent contemporaries, crisp, witty, half-mocking, half-sympathetic, recalled the succinct vivacity of John Aubrey's sketches. In 1967, the first part of his autobiography, 1872–1914, was published. It had been delivered to publishers 10 years before. Though rather sketchy in its provision of conventional biographical material, Russell, taking relish in his candour, is unusually informative about his love affairs in and out of marriage.
Russell was married four times: first to Alys Whitall Pearsall. daughter of the late Robert Pearsall Smith. The marriage was dissolved in 1921, and in the same year he married Dora Winifred, daughter of the late Sir Frederick Black. The marriage was dissolved in 1935, and in 1936 he married Patricia Helen. daughter of Mr. Harry Evelyn Spence. The marriage was dissolved in 1952, and in the same year he married Edith. daughter of Mr. Edward Bronson Finch, of New York. By his second marriage Russell had two children, John Conrad, the Viscount Amberley, and Lady Katherine Jane Russell, By his third marriage he had a son, the Honorable Conrad Sebestian Robert Russell. He is succeeded in the peerage by Viscount Amberley, who was born in 1921 and married, in 1946, Susan Doninhan, daughter of the late Vachel Lindsay, by whom he has two daughters.
Philosopher who sought involvement with problems of the age
Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., died last night at his home Plas Penrhyn, Merionethshire. He was 97.
Bertrand Russell's claim to be remembered by history rests securely on his work in mathematical and symbolic logic and in philosophy, on which his influence was pervasive and profound. The story of symbolic logic and of the philosophy of mathematics in the twentieth century is the story of the expansion of the edifice which Russell and Frege founded. There have been major reconstructions, but they are reconstructions from within. In general philosophy, when we think of G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein as shapers of the thought of our half-century, we are thinking of men who were fired by Russell and themselves gave Russell fire. There exist no disciples of Russell. Instead there exist scores of inquiring philosophers driven by questions which Russell was the first to ask. For Russell not only combined the hardihood of the extremist with the candour of the artist: he also had a lively sense of the ridiculous. So, if there were logical absurdities latent inside his own abstract constructions, he exposed them with cheerful callousness. The incongruities which he would not hide have become the cruces of philosophy.
Russell looked every inch a Russell and had all the "crankiness" of a Russell. He spoke his mind with Olympian disregard of the censure he might incur from established persons or received opinions or, for that matter, the law, which twice committed him to prison. He was throughout his life an ornament and an acquisition to a variety of public causes, generally of an unpopular kind. Into the last and for him the greatest of these, unilateral nuclear disarmament, he threw himself, now in his mid-eighties, with unabated fervour, seized withthe mission of rousing his fellow men to the peril in which they stood. He was obsessed by the enormity of the evil of which these weapons could be the instrument. In the intensity of his denunciation and the galvanic activity of his failing powers there came to be less and less room for sober assessment of the political means of deliverance from the doom so vividly before his mind.
He was the intellectual in the twenty-first century who, perhaps, before all others in this country, solved the problem of communications. Russell found a way of communicating with ordinary men and explored it to the full, especially and deliberately, in his later life. There was nothing new in the method. He merely expressed lucid thoughts in lucid style. But how few of the thinkers or artists who were contemporary with him could do half much!
Equally important, he could use not just terms of language but terms of reference which were intelligible to ordinary men and women because they were inside their experience. Here was a man of uncommon ancestry, uncommon intellectual brilliance, uncommon habits of mind and behavior, who was yet at case in addressing common men—and they were at ease in listening to him. The answer is to be found in the paradox that he yet shared a common ancestry with them. His thought was English to the core. He dallied with Hegelianism when he was at Cambridge, but no one with his roots so firmly in English thought and in England—Whig England—at that time could have long remained an apostle of Hegel.
The Right Honourable Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, was born at Ravenscroft, near Tintern, in Monmouthshire on May 18, 1872. He was the second son of Viscount Amberley and grandson of Lord John Russell, who had been created Earl Russell at the end of his long political life. His mother was Katherine, daughter of the second Lord Stanley of Alderley. He was as much a Russell as his elder brother, the second Earl, was a Stanley. In his appearance, his artistic qualities, and his versatility the Russell genius found expression. Russell would have been the first to admit that much of his life was determined by his early years, which were not calculated to produce a conventional citizen. His father and mother had converted from orthodoxy to agnosticism before his birth. But his mother died when he was two, his father when he was three, and he was placed under the care of his grandmother, "a Puritan with the moral rigidity of the Covenanters," as he called her, who maintained a gloomy theism at Pembroke Lodge. His father had directed that the two children should be brought up agnostics and had appointed two free-thinkers as guardians, but the direction was set aside in court and the children made wards in Chancery.
When he went to Cambridge, Bertrand Russell lived (not very happily) and was educated by governesses and tutors, at home. Cambridge was his first release into the outside world, a new world", as he said, "of infinite delight", and of friends such as Lowes Dickinson, Dr. Trevelyan, McTaggart, and G. E. Moore. The last two cast their spell over him. Under J. M. F. McTaggart's influence he became for some time a Hegelian, or, more precisely, a Bradleian. but Moore, whose influence on the whole of that Cambridge generation was so profound and so fortunate, broke Hegel's spell. Russell had gone to Trinity College as a scholar in 1890, but was only bracketed seventh Wrangler in 1893. His relatively low position may be explained by the fact that mathematics interested him not so much for his own sake as for being an example of certain knowledge: his interest was philosophical, The following year he took a First Class in the Moral Science Tripos with exceptional distinction. On going down from Cambridge he spent some months as honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Paris, and later made a study in Berlin of social and economic questions which bore fruit early in 1896 in six lectures on German Social Democracy for the London School of Economics. But the political career which seemed marked out for him by his heritage was abandoned-if he had ever seriously considered it in favour of the greater interest in laying afresh the foundations of mathematics, and his later resumptions of political interest were always, until nearer the end of his life, rather desultory.
In 1895 he had been elected a lecturer at Trinity, and in 1896 he lectured in America on non-Euclidean geometry. He published an Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, and then his training in mathematics and philosophy led him to study the thinker in whom their work was most perfectly exemplified. His Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, a work of great distinction, was published in 1900, his first major work. It set a higher estimate on Leibniz's thought than was usual at the time—an estimate he never altered, describing Leibniz, in his History of Western Philosophy, as "one of the supreme intellects of all time." Russell's judgment was, of course, founded on his recognition of Leibniz as "a pioneer in mathematical logy, of which he perceived the importance when no one else did." This was the field in which Russell was to do his most revolutionary work, and in outlook as well as in achievement he resembled Leibniz closely.
In 1900, at a mathematical con-gress in Paris, Russeil drew attention to the works of Peano, and in 1903 to those of Frege at the time the two most immediate influences on his thought. It was their explorations and those of Leibniz which led him in 1903 to give to the world his Principles of Mathematics, whose purpose was "first, to show that all mathematics follows from symbolic logic, and, secondly, to discover, as far as possible, what are the prin-ciples of symbolic logic itself". The Principles of Mathematics was intended to be a first volume to be followed by a second giving a deduc-tive exposition of results. This task was in fact carried out in a separate work in collaboration with A. N. Whitehead. Their Principia Mathematica was begun in 1900 and completed 10 years later in three volumes, which were published in 1910, 1912, and 1913 respectively. It was republished. with a new introduction, in 1925 and in successful years. The Royal Society, into whose Fellowship Russell had been admitted in 1908, made a grant towards publication from the Government fund. Of its composition Russeli later wrote: "My intellect never quite recovered from the strain. I have ever since been definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before."
Principia Mathematica is one of the decisive books in the history of both mathematics and logic. More completely and satisfactorily than in any previous work, the reduction of mathematics to a branch of logic was effected. In the course of the reduction, a new symbolism of great logical power in skilled hands was developed. It was the use of this power which was Russell's most enduring contribution to philosophical thought and the most constant feature of all his philosophical writings. He himself called his contribution "Logical Atomism," and it is a term which does justice to his skill and perception in logical analysis—his attempt to break down complex ideas into, if not simple, at least irrefutable components.
The details of Russell's achievement, which allows one, without the least exaggeration—in terms of British thought at least to talk of pre-Russell and post-Russell philosophy—are the concern of the student of philosophy. But even the layman can comprehend the value of freeing logical analysis from the tyranny of ordinary grammar or syntax. "The utility of philosophical syntax in relation to traditional problems is very great—such is his own modest estimate of his achievement late in his life."
The point is best illustrated by a summary of one of his most important discoveries, the theory of descriptions criptions, first developed in On Denoting, published in Mind in 1905. Such phrases as "The present President of the United States" have caused a lot of fruitless distress to philosophers trying to find the meaning of existence. "Suppose I say 'The golden mountain does not exist.' And suppose you ask "What is the golden mountain? It would seem that, if I say 'It is the golden mountain', I am attributing some sort of existence to it." In the two phrases "The golden mountain does not exist" and "The round square does not exist," the only difference lies in the words "The golden mountain" and "The round square implying that the one is one thing and the other another. Although neither exists. It was this problem which Russell sought to meet by the theory of descriptions. The statement "Scott was the author of Waverley" is, by this theory, interpreted as saying: There is an entity e such that the statement 'x wrote Waverley is true if x is e and false otherwise: moreover c is Scott." Thus "The golden mountain does not exist" means: "There is no entity e such that x is golden and mountainous is true when x is c but not otherwise." Existence", therefore, can only be asserted of descriptions. Russell was scarcely putting his claim too high when he said of the theory that it "clears up two millennia of muddle-headedness about 'existence', beginning with Plato's Theaetetus".
In 50 years of philosophical writing Russell used the destructive power of this logical technique to examine the traditional problems and traditional philosophies, and the mere use of the technique, however acceptable or unacceptable his conclusions, was a source of clarification and enlightenment, particularly in his analysis of relations, classes, continuity, infinity, and language forms. His progressive extension of methodological doubt into every field of philosophical inquiry is his most lasting monument. The incorporation of mathematics and the development of a powerful logical technique were, as he himself said, what distinguished his modern analytical empiricism from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Empirical knowledge and deductive knowledge were the only two kinds of knowledge which Russell was prepared to admit. He sought answers to the problems of philosophy which had the quality of science rather than philosophy. He admitted that there might be problems to which science and the intellect could not find the answers, but he refused to admit that there was any other way, intuitive or otherwise, by which the answers could be found.
Russell's empiricism is perhaps the most valid quality in his erratic and usually popular intrusions into Liberal political philosophy. He was no political philosopher. But a man born with the blood of the Russells in his veins could hardly avoid carrying the spirit of Locke in his head. "The only philosophy," he wrote in Philosophy and Politics in 1947, that affords a theoretical justification of democracy and that accords with democracy in its temper of mind, is empiricism. Locke, who may be regarded as the founder of empiricism, makes it clear how closely this is connected with his views on liberty and toleration. From this, Russell argued that the essence of the Liberal view lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held; instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively. It cannot be said that he himself followed this precept in all his public utterances.
In 1907 he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a woman suffrage candidate at Wimbledon. But it was the 1914-18 War which was to find an outlet for his unsatisfied impulse to do good. Without hesitation he flung himself wholeheartedly into the pacifist campaign. The unhappy results made him a national storm-centre and need be only summarily recalled. In The Times he avowed the authorship of a pamphlet for for the No-Conscription Fellowship and was duly fined £100 at the Mansion House and removed, with petty illiberality, from his lectureship at Trinity College. His library there was seized to pay the fine. In the autumn of that year, 1916, he was due to lecture at Harvard, but it was made known to the Harvard authorities that the British Government did not consider it in the public interest to issue a passport enabling bim to leave the country.
In September of the same year, he was forbidden from entering any prohibited area, and a little later, a book, Justice in Wartime, in which he likened the warring nations to the fighting of dogs angered by each other's smell, caused great resentment. Finally, in February 1918, he was sentenced at Bow Street to six months' imprisonment for having, in the organ of the No-Conscription Fellowship, made comments on the American Army "intended and likely to prejudice his Majesty's relations with the United States." On appeal, the sentence was ordered to be served in the first division instead of the second. It was while he was in prison that he wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.
After the war, he allowed his mind to range over almost the whole gamut of human studies. A visit to Russia in 1920 with the British Labour delegation left him unimpressed by the "military dictatorship" of the Bolsheviks. He immediately uttered his first warning of what Bolshevism really was—in his Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, and he remained a critic of Soviet communism even during the 1939-45 War, when Russia's popularity was at its height. His Analysis of Mind was the book of some lectures given in London and was published in 1921. Meanwhile, in 1920, he went to China for a brief period as Professor of Philosophy at Peking. It led to the publication of The Problem of China, a peg on which he hung his animus against Western and Japanese civilization, On Returning from China he stood unsuccessfully in 1922 and 1923 as a Labour candidate for Chelsea. Between the ABC of Atoms (1923) and the ABC of Relativity (1925), both beautifully lucid expositions, was sandwiched The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, written in collaboration with his second wife,
In 1927 their interest in education led them to establish a school near Petersfield where a large measure of licence was allowed to the children; in 1934 his wife removed it to Hertfordshire. He wrote two books on the subject, On Education in 1926 and Education and the Social Order in 1932; in them modern tendencies were carried to exaggerated lengths. Between these books appeared The Analysis of Matter, a magnificent review of modern physics, with more questionable metaphysical deductions. Other books followed: An Outline of Philosophy, Sceptical Essays, Marriage and Morals, and The Conquest of Happiness. In his books on social and ethical questions Russell mixed with his sometimes revolutionary ethics some wise advice. He could not write a chapter which, however unacceptable his conclusions, did not contain some provoking, stimulating, or penetrating observation. He certainly, in such offerings, often wrote trivially on weighty matters, throwing away sense for the sake of a jest or a paradox. But they had a more serious intent, and the perceptive reader could usually find and profit by it.
In 1934, he published his most considerable work outside the realms of logic and philosophy. Freedom and Organization traced the main causes of political, economic, and social change in Europe and America during the nineteenth century. It foreshadowed his monumental History of Western Philosophy by its attempt to see ideas in the context of the age which gave them birth. But it was quite different in construction from the later work, being more of a synthesis than an analysis, and it contained some of his most sparkling writing.
Russell, during the thirties, was being profoundly influenced by the rise of Hitler, confessing to a Fabian gathering that it had almost persuaded him to become a Christian. But although the success of such an irrational force as Hitlerism shook, as with so many others, so many of his rationalist predispositions, and made him abandon pacifism, and although he sought (but failed) to analyse the nature of power in a popular book, he lacked the political equipment to achieve a satisfactory statement of the twentieth-century's political problem. This was apparent in the Reith lectures which he delivered in 1948-49 on Authority and the Individual. He chose the wrong subject on which to speak, but he left no doubt of his ability to relate complex ideas to ordinary men's everyday experience.
During the later years of his life, Russell was in some danger of becoming a popular, a revered, even a respectable figure. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, and the year before had been given the O.M. In 1953, the man who had once been judicially proclaimed unfit to hold an academic chair at a certain American university was elected a bonorary associate of the New York National Institute of Arts and Letters. His could have been the serene old age of a tame philosopher, a domesticated sage, publicly honoured, listened to with affection and respect, vouchsafing the occasional quip often enough and sharp enough to keep alive the legend of the rebel.
He chose otherwise. There still echoes in the memory of a broadcast he gave in 1954 after the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, his thin, sing-song voice charged with the detached intensity of a prophet: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise: if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death." It was the warning he was to reiterate, with a rising pitch of stridency, until the end of his life.
He assisted at the birth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in February 1958 and became its president. Before and after that, he strove to mobilize the opinions of scientists in support of his views. In September 1960, impatient of the law-abiding methods of C.N.D. and finding its chairman, Canon Collins, "impossible to work with," he branched out with the Committee of 100 "for civil disobedience against nuclear warfare." The disobedience proved to be of a fairly orderly kind, and Russell, who was then 88, continued to speak for the campaign up and down the country, to issue urgent statements to the press, and to stage public demonstrations to the extent that his health allowed. He also made a practice of sending admonitory telegrams to world leaders, notably at the height of the Cuban crisis in October 1962
His defiance of authority again led to 10 imprisonment. In September 1961, he was summoned with others of the Committee of 100 for inciting members of the public to commit a breach of the peace—a forthcoming sit-down demonstration in Parliament Square. Having refused to be bound over to be of good behavior, he was sentenced to two months' imprisonment, a term which the magistrates reduced to seven days after representations by Russell's counsel. He served the sentence in Brixten Prison, with which he had become acquainted 43 years before
He chose otherwise. There still echoes in the memory of a broadcast he gave in 1954 after the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, his thin, sing-song voice charged with the detached intensity of a prophet: "Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise: if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death." It was the warning he was to reiterate, with a rising pitch of stridency, until the end of his life.
He assisted at the birth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in February 1958 and became its president. Before and after that, he strove to mobilise the opinions of scientists in support of his views. In September 1960, impatient of the law-abiding methods of C.N.D. and finding its chairman, Canon Collins, "impossible to work with," he branched out with the Committee of 100 "for civil disobedience against nuclear warfare." The disobedience proved to be of a fairly orderly kind, and Russell, who was then 88, continued to speak for the campaign up and down the country, to issue urgent statements to the press, and to stage public demonstrations to the extent that his health allowed. He also made a practice of sending admonitory telegrams to world leaders, notably at the height of the Cuban crisis in October 1962.
His defiance of authority again led to imprisonment. In September 1961, he was summoned with others of the Committee of 100 for inciting members of the public to commit a breach of the peace—a forthcoming sit-down demonstration in Parliament Square. Having refused to be bound over to be of good behavior, he was sentenced to two months' imprisonment, a term which the magistrates reduced to seven days after representations by Russell's counsel. He served the sentence in Brixton Prison, with which he had become acquainted 43 years before.
At the beginning of 1963 Russell resigned the presidency of the Committee of 100, stating among his reasons that he had become occupied with work of a different kind, although directed towards the same end. And later in the year he announced the launching of two foundations, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Atlantic Peace Foundation, whose purpose was to develop international resistance to the threat of nuclear war. In his last years he lived in growing isolation at Plas Penrhyn, his country home in North Wales. His dealings with the outside world were conducted by his secretary Mr. Ralph Shoenman; while his public undertakings to which he attached his name became increasingly bizarre -- like his international war crimes tribunal, in which a bench of celebrated intellectuals were to try the United States in absentia on charges arising out of its policies in Vietnam. After some difficulty over a venue, the tribunal held its first session in Stockholm, and returned a unanimous verdict of Guilty.
These controversial activities, inspiring to some, misdirected or ridiculous to others, obscured in his final years the extraordinary achievements of his long life; his influence on philosophy and, something the general public had better reason to remember, his genius as a popularizer of unfamiliar or difficult ideas. He retained the style which puts him in the company of Berkeley and Hume, who adorned literature as well as philosophy. Whether he wrote in symbols or in words he was equally dextrous and equally happy. His clear-cut antitheses, his magnificent self-assurance, his polished ruthlessness of argument, his dazzling paradoxes, his wit and gaiety are the envy of all others who try to write. When passion intruded, when the Whig possessed the philosopher, his writing must be ranked with the noblest in the language. He was equally a master of the microphone and gave several memorable series of broadcasts after the war. His vignettes of some of his eminent contemporaries, crisp, witty, half-mocking, half-sympathetic, recalled the succinct vivacity of John Aubrey's sketches. In 1967, the first part of his autobiography, 1872–1914, was published. It had been delivered to publishers 10 years before. Though rather sketchy in its provision of conventional biographical material, Russell, taking relish in his candour, is unusually informative about his love affairs in and out of marriage.
Russell was married four times: first to Alys Whitall Pearsall. daughter of the late Robert Pearsall Smith. The marriage was dissolved in 1921, and in the same year he married Dora Winifred, daughter of the late Sir Frederick Black. The marriage was dissolved in 1935, and in 1936 he married Patricia Helen. daughter of Mr. Harry Evelyn Spence. The marriage was dissolved in 1952, and in the same year he married Edith. daughter of Mr. Edward Bronson Finch, of New York. By his second marriage Russell had two children, John Conrad, the Viscount Amberley, and Lady Katherine Jane Russell, By his third marriage he had a son, the Honorable Conrad Sebestian Robert Russell. He is succeeded in the peerage by Viscount Amberley, who was born in 1921 and married, in 1946, Susan Doninhan, daughter of the late Vachel Lindsay, by whom he has two daughters.
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