Bertrand Russell(1872–1970)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, the country house above the Wye valley near Trellech in Monmouthshire, on the eighteenth of May 1872, third child of John Russell, Viscount Amberley, the eldest son of the 1st Earl Russell (Prime Minister 1846 to 1852 and 1865 to 1866), and Katharine Stanley of Alderley. His parents both died before his fourth birthday: his mother of diphtheria in 1874, his father of bronchitis in 1876. He and his elder brother Frank were raised by their paternal grandparents at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park (Earl Russell died 1878 and the rearing fell to the Countess Russell, the dowager Lady Russell). He was tutored at home by a sequence of German and Swiss tutors in mathematics, science, French, German and the standard Whig-aristocratic liberal-political instruction of the household, went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890 in his eighteenth year on the Mathematics Scholarship, took the Mathematical Tripos in 1893 and the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1894, and was elected Fellow of Trinity in 1895.

He published his first major philosophical work A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz in 1900 and the foundational mathematical work The Principles of Mathematics in 1903, the work that committed him to the long programme that became Principia Mathematica. Between 1903 and 1910 he worked with the older Cambridge mathematician Alfred North Whitehead on the formal-logical derivation of arithmetic from the primitive propositional and predicate-logic axioms of a single fully-formalised symbolic logic; the three-volume Principia Mathematica was published by the Cambridge University Press in 1910, 1912 and 1913. The work was the central single foundational work of twentieth-century mathematical logic, the standard reference of the logicist programme, and was the inheritance from which Kurt Gödel's 1931 incompleteness theorems (which used the Principia notation) and the modern computer science of the late 1930s and 1940s descended.

He was dismissed from his Trinity Fellowship in July 1916 for his public opposition to the British conduct of the First World War, was tried at the Bow Street Magistrates' Court in June 1918 under the Defence of the Realm Act for an article in the Tribunal on the American intervention, was sentenced to six months in the second division of Brixton Prison (commuted on appeal to the first division), and used the prison time to draft the long Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919, the popular exposition of the Principia programme). He published across the 1920s and 1930s the long sequence of popular-philosophical and political works (The Problem of China 1922, The Prospects of Industrial Civilisation 1923 with Dora Russell, Marriage and Morals 1929, Education and the Social Order 1932, Power: A New Social Analysis 1938) that built the public reputation as the leading philosophical-popular essayist of the English-speaking world.

He was appointed William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1940 and through the 1940s wrote the work that became A History of Western Philosophy at the request of the publisher W. W. Norton: the eight-hundred-page survey of the central body of European-language philosophy from Thales to John Dewey, published at New York in 1945. The History sold a hundred and seventy-five thousand copies in the first six months and ran through over thirty editions in the next twenty-five years; the income from the History gave him the financial independence on which the late political work of the 1950s and 1960s rested. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 in his seventy-eighth year, the Swedish Academy citing his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.

He took up across the late 1940s and 1950s the political-and-public-platform leadership of the international campaign against nuclear weapons. He delivered the central Reith Lectures Authority and the Individual in 1948 to 1949 on the BBC, drafted with Albert Einstein the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of July 1955 on the danger of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, took the founding presidency of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957 (the Pugwash Conferences won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 on the strength of their long disarmament work), and founded the Committee of 100 in 1960 as the direct-action successor to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was inherited as 3rd Earl Russell on his elder brother Frank's death in 1931, lived in his last decade at Plas Penrhyn at Penrhyndeudraeth in north Wales, and died there on the second of February 1970 in his ninety-seventh year. The Russell name in modern philosophy carries the weight of Principia Mathematica and the Nobel Prize of 1950.