BIOGRAPHY
Betrand Russell or his real name Betrand
Arthur William Russell was born in 18th May 1872 at Trellech,
Monmouthshire, United Kingdom. He was born into one of an influential and liberal family of the
British aristocracy in Britain. His parents, Viscount and Viscountness
Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberely consented to his wife’s
affair with their children’s tutor, the biologist Douglas Spadling. Both were
early advocates of birth control a time
when that was considered scandalous. Lord Amberely was an Atheist and his
atheism was evident when he asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as
Russell’s secular godfather. He died as written in historical book was 2nd
February 1970 at Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, United Kingdom aged 97. He get many awards such as De Morgan
Medal ( 1932 ), Sylvester Medal ( 1934 ), Nobel Prize in Literature ( 1950 ),
Kalinga Prize ( 1957 ) and Jerusalem Prize ( 1963 ). He is not only famous in
philosopher but in logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic
and political activist. At various points of his life he considered that he is
Liberal, a socialist and a pacifist. He also admitted that he had never been
any of these in any profound sense.
In December 1894 he married Miss Alys
Pearsall Smith. After spending some months in Berlin studying social democracy,
they went to live near Haslemere, where he devoted his time to the study of
philosophy. In 1900 he visited the Mathematical Congress at Paris. He was
impressed with the ability of the Italian mathematician Peano and his pupils,
and immediately studied Peano's works. In 1903 he wrote his first important
book, The Principles of Mathematics, and with his friend Dr. Alfred Whitehead
proceeded to develop and extend the mathematical logic of Peano and Frege. From
time to time he abandoned philosophy for politics. In 1910 he was appointed
lecturer at Trinity College. After the first World War broke out, he took an
active part in the No Conscription fellowship and was fined £ 100 as the author
of a leaflet criticizing a sentence of two years on a conscientious objector.
His college deprived him of his lectureship in 1916. He was offered a post at
Harvard university, but was refused a passport. He intended to give a course of
lectures (afterwards published in America as Political Ideals, 1918) but was
prevented by the military authorities. In 1918 he was sentenced to six months'
imprisonment for a pacifistic article he had written in the Tribunal. His
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) was written in prison. His
Analysis of Mind (1921) was the outcome of some lectures he gave in London,
which were organized by a few friends who got up a subscription for the
purpose.
In 1920 Russell had paid a short visit to
Russia to study the conditions of Bolshevism on the spot. In the autumn of the
same year he went to China to lecture on philosophy at the Peking university.
On his return in Sept. 1921, having been divorced by his first wife, he married
Miss Dora Black. They lived for six years in Chelsea during the winter months
and spent the summers near Lands End. In 1927 he and his wife started a school
for young children, which they carried on until 1932. He succeeded to the
earldom in 1931. He was divorced by his second wife in 1935 and the following
year married Patricia Helen Spence. In 1938 he went to the United States and
during the next years taught at many of the country's leading universities. In
1940 he was involved in legal proceedings when his right to teach philosophy at
the College of the City of New York was questioned because of his views on
morality. When his appointment to the college faculty was cancelled, he
accepted a five-year contract as a lecturer for the Barnes foundation, Merion,
Pa., but the cancellation of this contract was announced in Jan. 1943 by Albert
C. Barnes, director of the foundation.
EARLY CAREER
Russell began his published work in 1896
with German Social Democracy.In 1896 he taught German social democracy at the
London School of Economics.[90] He was a member of the Coefficients dining club
of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and
Beatrice Webb.[91]
He now started an intensive study of the
foundations of mathematics at Trinity. In 1898 he wrote An Essay on the
Foundations of Geometry which discussed the Cayley–Klein metrics used for
non-Euclidean geometry.[92] He attended the International Congress of
Philosophy in Paris in 1900 where he met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro
Padoa.,they gave Russell their literature including the Formulario mathematico.
In 1903 he published The Principles of
Mathematics, a work on foundations of mathematics. It advanced a thesis of
logicism, that mathematics and logic are one and the same.[93]At the age of 29,
in February 1901, Russell underwent what he called a "sort of mystic
illumination", after witnessing Whitehead's wife's acute suffering in an
angina attack.
In 1905 he wrote the essay "On
Denoting", which was published in the philosophical journal Mind. Russell
was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1908.[55][65]
In 1910 he became a lecturer in the
University of Cambridge, where he was approached by the Austrian engineering
student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became his PhD student. Russell viewed
Wittgenstein as a genius and a successor who would continue his work on
logic..[95] Russell delivered his lectures on Logical Atomism, his version of
these ideas, in 1918, before the end of the First World War. Wittgenstein was,
at that time, serving in the Austrian Army and subsequently spent nine months
in an Italian prisoner of war camp at the end of the conflict.
GENERAL PHILOSOPHY
Betrand Russell is not a name that is an
alien among philosophers and people who love philosophy since his contribution
in philosophical works include analytic, Mathematics, Science, religion,
Epistemology, ethics, and language philosophy. Even though, there are a few of
his works that been criticized by peoples but that never stop his love for
wisdom and give thought about the thing around him.
As we know that to list everything that
Betrand Russell philosophy it will turn out to be such a long list. There are a
few of his general philosophy that include in Mathematics and Scientific. In
Mathematics field, he contributed in thoughts about the relation of Mathematics
and Logic. He said that the logic has become more mathematical and Mathematics
has become more logical. The consequence is that it has now wholly impossible
to draw a line between the two; in fact the two are one. They differ as boy and
man: logic is the youth of Mathematics and Mathematics is the manhood of logic.
This view is resented by logicians who, having spent their time in the study of
classical texts, are incapable of following a piece of symbolic reasoning, and
by mathematicians who have learnt a technique without troubling to inquire into
its meaning or justifications. Both types are now fortunately growing rarer.
In sciences field, Betrand Russell had
thought about The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. He called it as logical
atomism is because the atom that he wish to arrive at as the sort of last
residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will
be called as “particular” which are such things as little patches of colour or
sounds, momentary thing and some of them will be predicates or relations and so
on. The point is that the atom of physical analysis. It is a rather curious
fact in philosophy that the data which are undeniable to start with are always
rather vague and ambiguous. You can, for instance, say: “There are a number of
people in this room at this moment.” That is obviously in some sense
undeniable. But when you come to try and define what this room is, and what it
is for a person to be in a room, and how you are going to distinguish one
person from another, and so forth, you find that what you have said is most
fearfully vague and that you really do not know what you meant. That is a
rather singular fact, that everything you are really sure of, right off is
something that you do not know the meaning of, and the moment you get a precise
statement you will not be sure whether it is true or false, at least right off.
The process of sound philosophizing, to his mind, consists mainly in passing
from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things that we feel quite sure of, to
something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is
involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real
truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.
FIRST WORLD WAR
During the First World War, Russell was one of the few
people to engage in active pacifist activities and in 1916, he was dismissed
from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm
Act 1914.[96] Russell played a significant part in the Leeds Convention in June
1917, a historic event which saw well over a thousand "anti-war
socialists" gather; many being delegates from the Independent Labour Party
and the Socialist Party, united in their pacifist beliefs and advocating a
peace settlement.[97] The international press reported that Russell appeared
with a number of Labour MPs, including Ramsey McDonald and Philip Snowden, as
well as former Liberal MP and anti-conscription campaigner, Professor Arnold
Lupton. After the event, Russell told Lady Ottoline Morrell that, "to my
surprise, when I got up to speak, I was given the greatest ovation that was
possible to give anybody".
The Trinity incident resulted in Russell being fined
£100, which he refused to pay in hopes that he would be sent to prison but his
books were sold at auction to raise the money. The books were bought by
friends; he later treasured his copy of the King James Bible that was stamped
"Confiscated by Cambridge Police".
A later conviction for publicly lecturing against
inviting the US to enter the war on Britain's side resulted in six months' imprisonment
in Brixton prison (see Bertrand Russell's views on society) in 1918.[100] While
in prison, Russell read enormously and wrote the book Introduction to
Mathematical Philosophy.
I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no
engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no
interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, "Introduction
to Mathematical Philosophy"... and began the work for "Analysis of
Mind"
Russell was reinstated in 1919, resigned in 1920, was
Tarner Lecturer 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944 until 1949.
In 1924, Bertrand again gained press
attention when attending a "banquet" in the House of Commons with
well-known campaigners, including Arnold Lupton, who had been a Member of
Parliament and had also endured imprisonment for "passive resistance to
military or naval service".
SECOND WORLD WAR
Russell opposed rearmament against Nazi
Germany, but in 1940 he changed his view that avoiding a full-scale world war
was more important than defeating Hitler. He concluded that Adolf Hitler taking
over all of Europe would be a permanent threat to democracy. In 1943, he
adopted a stance toward large-scale warfare, "Relative Political
Pacifism": War was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme
circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils.
Before World War II, Russell taught at the
University of Chicago, later moving on to Los Angeles to lecture at the UCLA
Department of Philosophy. He was appointed professor at the City College of New
York (CCNY) in 1940, but after a public outcry the appointment was annulled by
a court judgment that pronounced him "morally unfit" to teach at the
college due to his opinions—notably those relating to sexual morality, detailed
in Marriage and Morals (1929). The protest was started by the mother of a
student who would not have been eligible for his graduate-level course in
mathematical logic; many intellectuals, led by John Dewey, protested at his
treatment. Albert Einstein's oft-quoted aphorism that "great spirits have
always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" originated in
his open letter, dated 19 March 1940, to Morris Raphael Cohen, a professor
emeritus at CCNY, supporting Russell's appointment 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, lecturing to a varied audience on
the history of philosophy; these lectures formed the basis of A History of
Western Philosophy. His relationship with the eccentric Albert C. Barnes soon
soured, and he returned to Britain in 1944 to rejoin the faculty of Trinity
College.
