Birthdays

Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd Earl Russell of Kingston Russell, Viscount Amberley of Amberley and of Ardsalla (1872-1970)

Author, philosopher, mathematician, educator, antiwar activist

Nobel Peace laureate, 1950

His family had been prominent since the days of Henry VIII; his grandfather was Prime Minister of Great Britain; his parents were notorious freethinkers; his father approved his mother’s affair with a family tutor, and they wanted young Bertrand raised an agnostic.

Both his parents died by the time Russell was four, leaving him and his siblings in the care of his aged Victorian grandparents. A classically miserable Victorian childhood ensued, Russell’s miseries relieved only by his discoveries of the poet Shelley and the works of Euclid.

He cut a swathe through Cambridge- and the exclusive Apostles, and published the first of this seventy books in 1896 (he also published over 2,000 articles and almost uncountable correspondence). His work, “On Denoting” marked him as one of the premier logicians of the age; with A.N. Whitehead, he published Principia Mathematica- a philosophical treatise on mathematics- in 1910-13. Hired by Trinity College, Cambridge as a lecturer in 1910, he adopted Wittgenstein as his protege, nursing him through his various neurotic outbreaks and depressions. Russell lost his job in 1916 after being arrested for antiwar activities; refusing to pay the 100-pound fine, his books were confiscated by the police and sold at auction. In 1918 he was convicted for lecturing against US entry into World War I and spent six months in prison. He made good use of the time, writing Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.

Reinstated, in 1919, Russell resigned in 1920. He traveled extensively in the newly formed USSR after the war; he didn’t think much of Lenin, and earned the ire of the Japanese press by refusing to give interviews after a newspaper mistakenly declared him dead of influenza in 1921. After his return to England, his long-dormant first marriage ended in divorce in 1921; shortly after he married his second wife and because a father for the first time.

In 1927, Russell founded a famous experimental school with his wife, and fell in for a time with one of the followers of gestalt theory. In 1931, he inherited his brother’s earldom, and divorced his wife the next year. He championed Indian independence through the 1930s.

By 1940, Russell was embroiled in scandal in New York, his appointment to a City College teaching post voided by a judge who found Russell’s published views on sexual morality made him unfit for the job. He took a fixture with the Barnes Foundation, but no one got along with the irascible Dr. Barnes for long, and Russell returned to Trinity as a fellow for the period 1944-49. His History of Western Philosophy (1945) was a best-seller and left him financially secure for the remainder of his long life. During 1930s and ‘40s he opposed Nazism, then Stalinism.

At the time of life when most were winding down, Russell was just warming up.He inaugurated the BBC’s Reith Lectures in 1948 and became an influential figure in the post-World War II nuclear disarmament movement. In 1949, King George VI presented Russell the Order of Merit, dryly remarking. “You have sometimes behaved in a manner that would not do if generally adopted.” Russell smiled and said nothing, but later said his first thought was, “Yes, just like your brother.”

He was divorced and remarried again in 1952; in the 1960s, he broadened his antiwar portfolio to include a vociferous and globe-trotting opposition to the Vietnam War. Presenting Russell, then 89, with a seven-day jail sentence, the judge offered to suspend if if Russell would give him his promise of “good behavior.” “No, I won’t,” Russell replied.

From 95 to 97 he published a three-volume autobiography; his last public statement, a condemnation of Israeli attacks on Egypt, was read at an international conference in Cairo the day after Bertrand Russell died in February, 1970.

His academic work was- and remains- stunning in its scope. It has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Related Sites:

The Bertrand Russell Society

Russell’s Nobel Lecture, 1950

715 Russell Quotations