Analytic philosophy, the dominant philosophy of the twentieth century, owes its existence more to Russell than to any other philosopher. And the system of logic developed by Russell and A. Whitehead, based on earlier work by Dedekind, Cantor, Frege, and Peano, broke logic out of its Aristotelian straitjacket. He was also one of the century's leading public intellectuals and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.
For example, he supported suffragists, free thought in religion and morals, and world government; he opposed World War I and the Vietnam War, nationalism, and political persecution.
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». While much of his writing was relatively practical and ephemeral in intent, he also contributed work of lasting importance in some of the most technical fields of philosophy and logic. He was the inventor of the Theory of Descriptions.
Whitehead, quickly became classics of mathematical logic. Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in View all reference entries ». View all related items in Oxford Reference ». Search for: 'Bertrand Russell' in Oxford Reference ». All Rights Reserved.
He devoted many hours to dealing with Wittgenstein 's various phobias and his frequent bouts of despair , but Russell continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development, even as it began to diverge more and more from his own views, including the later publication of Wittgenstein 's masterwork "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" in During World War I , Russell engaged in pacifist activities , which resulted in his dismissal from Trinity College following a conviction in and, in , six months' imprisonment in Brixton prison.
In , Russell traveled to Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution , during which he met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - , although his experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the Revolution.
He subsequently lectured for a year in Beijing, China , accompanied by his lover Dora Black , at one point becoming gravely ill with pneumonia eliciting incorrect reports of his death in the Japanese press. On the couple's return to England in , Dora was six months pregnant , and Russell arranged a hasty divorce from Alys, marrying Dora six days after the divorce was finalized. Russell supported himself during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics , Ethics and education to the layman.
He also founded together with Dora the experimental Beacon Hill School in , and after he left the school in , Dora continued it until Russell separated from, and finally divorced , Dora in after she had had two children with an American journalist, Griffin Barry.
He married his third wife , an Oxford undergraduate who had also been his children's governess since the summer of named Patricia "Peter" Spence. They had a son, Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell , who later became a prominent historian and one of the leading figures in the Liberal Democrat party. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York in but the appointment was annulled by a court judgment after a public outcry over his opinions and morals. He joined the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of philosophy.
These lectures would form the basis of his book, "A History of Western Philosophy" , a great commercial success which provided him with a steady income for the remainder of his life. He returned to Britain in and rejoined the faculty of Trinity College.
He was now world famous , even outside of academic circles, and frequently either the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles, as well as a regular participant in many BBC radio broadcasts. In , Russell divorced his third wife, and soon after the divorce married his fourth wife, Edith Finch , whom he had known since Edith remained with him until his death, and by all accounts their marriage was a happy , close and loving one.
Russell spent the s and s engaged in various political causes primarily related to nuclear disarmament , opposition to the Vietnam War and Israeli aggression in the Middle East , in company with several other prominent intellectuals of the time, and became something of a hero among many of the youthful members of the New Left.
He published his three-volume autobiography in , and , and, although frail, he remained lucid and clear thinking up to the day of his death. Russell died of influenza on 2 February , aged 97, after suddenly falling ill while reading at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth , Merionethshire, Wales.
He was cremated at Colwyn Bay and, in accordance with his wishes, there was no religious ceremony. His ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains later that year. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Russell along with G. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead , was largely responsible for the British "revolt" against the dominant Idealism of G. They strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy and sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact language and by breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest grammatical components.
Russell, in particular, saw formal Logic and science as the principal tools of the philosopher, and he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of Metaphysics , adopting William of Ockham 's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities Occam's Razor as a central part of the method of analysis.
Russell was particularly critical of the doctrine of internal relations the idea that everything has some relation, however distant, to everything else , so that in order to know any particular thing, we must know all of its relations , a doctrine he ascribed to the Absolute Idealism of G. Hegel and the Pragmatism of C. Russell argued that this would make space, time, science and the concept of number not fully intelligible.
Russell had great influence on modern mathematical Logic. His first mathematical book, "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry" , was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant , but he soon rejected it completely when he realized that it would have made Albert Einstein 's schema of space-time which he understood to be superior to his own system impossible. As a young man, he became very interested in the definition of number studying the work of George Boole , Georg Cantor and Augustus De Morgan , and followed Gottlob Frege in taking a logicist approach in which Logic was in turn based upon mathematical set theory.
In fact, Russell pursued a parallel course to Frege to some extent, and spent several years working on ideas that Frege had, unbeknown to Russell, already addressed.
It was only later that Russell became responsible for bringing the largely unknown Frege to the attention of the English-speaking world. It was with his work, "The Principles of Mathematics" , though, that Russell finally superseded Frege 's work.
He identified what has come to be known as Russell's Paradox to show that Frege 's naive set theory led to a contradiction. The paradox can be stated as the set of things, x , that are such that x is not a member of x , and is sometimes explained by the simplistic but more easily understood example, "If a barber shaves all and only those men in the village who do not shave themselves, does he shave himself?
When he found out about this breakthrough, Frege completely abandoned his Logicism.
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