Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born into the British aristocracy in 1872 and died in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven, having witnessed two world wars, the invention of nuclear weapons, and the moon landing. He spent nearly a century thinking, arguing, and writing — producing over seventy books and thousands of essays on logic, mathematics, philosophy, politics, ethics, and education.

His early philosophical work, produced with Alfred North Whitehead, attempted to ground all of mathematics in pure logic. The result, Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), is one of the great intellectual monuments of the twentieth century and one of the least-read. His later philosophical work introduced the theory of descriptions and helped establish analytic philosophy as the dominant tradition in the English-speaking world.

Russell was dismissed from his lectureship at Cambridge during the First World War for his pacifist opposition to conscription. He was imprisoned for six months in 1918. He was denied a position at the City College of New York in 1940 after a court ruled his appointment an ‘affront to the public welfare’ — primarily because of his liberal views on sex and religion. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, the citation praising him as ‘a defender of humanity and freedom of thought.’

He remained politically active into his nineties, founding the Pugwash Conferences on nuclear disarmament, issuing the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, and organising the International War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam. He died in February 1970.