About Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was an English philosopher, logician, and social reformer. Russell was born into the prominent Russell family, to the Viscount and Viscountess Amberley. He was orphaned at the age of four and moved into Pembroke Lodge to live with his grandparents, the Earl and Countess Russell. The Earl Russell had twice been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1846–1852; 1865–1866) and died in 1878, leaving Russell in the care of his grandmother. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890 and graduated in 1893 with a Bachelor of Arts. At Cambridge, Russell was introduced to philosophy through figures such as G. E. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead. Russell also came to oppose British idealism and led the "revolt against idealism" with Moore. He was one of the early 20th century's prominent logicians and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". Russell was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated in 1893. He was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the England-based India League. He went to prison for his pacifism during the First World War, and he initially supported appeasing Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, before changing his view in 1943, describing war as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of the Second World War, he welcomed American global hegemony in preference to either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He later criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, condemned the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, and became an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963). When Russell was eleven, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love". During these formative years, he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He influenced mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic philosophy.
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