Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS[66] (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.[67][68]

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The Right Honourable The Earl Russell OM FRS
Russell in 1957
Born	Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-05-18)18 May 1872 Trellech, Monmouthshire, Wales[lower-alpha 1]
Died	2 February 1970(1970-02-02) (aged 97) Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales
Education	Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, 1893)
Spouses	Alys Pearsall Smith ​ ​ (m. 1894; div. 1921)​ Dora Black ​ ​ (m. 1921; div. 1935)​ Patricia Spence ​ ​ (m. 1936; div. 1952)​ [1] Edith Finch ​ (m. 1952)​
Awards	De Morgan Medal (1932) Sylvester Medal (1934) Nobel Prize in Literature (1950) Kalinga Prize (1957) Jerusalem Prize (1963)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Institutions	Trinity College, Cambridge, London School of Economics, University of Chicago, University of California, Los Angeles
Academic advisors	James Ward[2] A. N. Whitehead
Doctoral students	Ludwig Wittgenstein
Other notable students	Raphael Demos
Main interests	Epistemology ethics logic mathematics metaphysics philosophy
Notable ideas	Analytic philosophy Automated reasoning Automated theorem proving Axiom of reducibility Barber paradox Berry paradox Chicken Connective Criticism of the coherence theory of truth Criticism of the doctrine of internal relations/logical holism Definite description Descriptivist theory of names Direct reference theory[3] Double negation Epistemic structural realism[4] Existential fallacy Failure of reference Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description Logical atomism (atomic proposition) Logical form Mathematical beauty Mathematical logic Meaning Metamathematics Philosophical logic Predicativism Propositional analysis Propositional calculus Naive set theory Neutral monism[5] Paradoxes of set theory Peano–Russell notation Propositional formula Self-refuting idea Quantification Russell–Myhill paradox Russell's conjugation Russell-style universes Russell's paradox Russell's teapot Russell's theory of causal lines[6] Russellian change Russellian propositions Russellian view (Russell's critique of Meinong's theory of objects) Set-theoretic definition of natural numbers Singleton Theory of descriptions Theory of relations Type theory/ramified type theory Tensor product of graphs Unity of the proposition
Influences Euclid Mill Peano Boole[7] De Morgan[8] Frege Cantor Kant[9] Santayana Meinong Spinoza James Mach[10] Hume[11] Leibniz Wittgenstein Whitehead Moore Stout Ward[12] Sidgwick[13] Shelley
Influenced Ludwig Wittgenstein A. J. Ayer Rudolf Carnap[14] John von Neumann[15] Kurt Gödel[16] Karl Popper[17] W. V. Quine[18] Noam Chomsky[19] Hilary Putnam[20] Saul Kripke[21] Moritz Schlick[22] Vienna Circle[23] J. L. Austin Kurt Grelling[24] G. H. Hardy[25] Alfred Tarski[26] Norbert Wiener[27] Robert Oppenheimer[28] Leon Chwistek[29] Alan Turing[30] Jacob Bronowski[31] Frank P. Ramsey[32] Jawaharlal Nehru[33] Tariq Ali[34] Sheikh Mujibur Rahman[35] Michael Albert[36] Che Guevara[37] Bernard Williams Donald Davidson[38] Thomas Kuhn[39] Nathan Salmon[40] Christopher Hitchens[41] Richard Dawkins[42] Carl Sagan[43] Isaiah Berlin[44] Albert Ellis[45] Martin Gardner[46] Daniel Dennett[47] Buckminster Fuller[48] Pervez Hoodbhoy[49] John Maynard Keynes[50] Isaac Asimov[51] Paul Kurtz[52] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn James Joyce[53] Kurt Vonnegut[54] Ray Kurzweil[55] Marvin Minsky[56] Herbert A. Simon[57] B. F. Skinner[58] John Searle[59] Andrei Sakharov[60] Stephen Hawking[61] Joseph Rotblat[62] Edward Said[63] Sidney Hook Frank Wilczek[64] A. C. Grayling Colin McGinn Txillardegi[65]
Member of the House of Lords
Lord Temporal
In office 4 March 1931 – 2 February 1970 Hereditary peerage
Preceded by	The 2nd Earl Russell
Succeeded by	The 4th Earl Russell
Personal details
Political party	Labour (1922–1965)
Other political affiliations	Liberal (1907–1922)
Signature

He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians,[68] 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".[lower-alpha 2] Together with his former teacher A. N. 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".[70]

Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League.[71][72][73] He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I,[74] but also saw the war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of World War II, he welcomed American global hegemony in favour of either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons.[75] He would later criticize Stalinist totalitarianism, condemn the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War and become an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.[76]

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".[77][78] He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).