Bertrand Russell

Introduction

Bertrand Russell is the British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual whose seven-decade career spanned the founding of analytic philosophy in the 1900s, the major systematic logical work of the 1910s, the empiricist epistemology and metaphysics of the 1920s and 1930s, the more popular philosophical writing of the mid-century, and the public engagement with nuclear disarmament and antiwar politics in the late life. He is, with Frege, G. E. Moore, and Wittgenstein, one of the founders of the analytic tradition, and the most institutionally and publicly visible philosopher of the twentieth century.

The work spans almost every area of philosophy. The Principles of Mathematics (1903) and the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913, with Alfred North Whitehead) developed the program of deriving mathematics from logic that Frege had initiated. On Denoting (1905) inaugurated the analytic philosophy of language with the theory of descriptions. The Problems of Philosophy (1912) is the most-read short introduction to philosophy in the twentieth century. The History of Western Philosophy (1945) is the most-read general history of philosophy of the same period. The political and social writing — Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), the autobiography, the autobiography, the engagement with nuclear disarmament — made Russell a public figure of a kind few academic philosophers have matched.

Life

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 in Trellech, Monmouthshire (Wales), to a prominent aristocratic family. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; his godfather was John Stuart Mill. Both of his parents died before he was four; his grandmother (Frances Russell) raised him at the family estate of Pembroke Lodge.

Russell studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1893, taking firsts in both the Mathematical Tripos and the Moral Sciences Tripos (the Cambridge name for philosophy) in 1894. The Cambridge years brought him into contact with G. E. Moore, whose 1898 break with British Idealism (the dominant Cambridge philosophical orientation at the time) Russell joined; the joint Russell-Moore turn against Bradley's idealism is conventionally treated as the founding moment of the analytic tradition.

The years 1898–1913 were Russell's most productive. A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), The Principles of Mathematics (1903), On Denoting (1905), the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (with Whitehead, 1910–1913), and the early epistemological work The Problems of Philosophy (1912) appeared in rapid succession. The 1902 discovery of the paradox in the foundations of Frege's logicist program (Russell's paradox — the set of all sets that are not members of themselves both is and is not a member of itself) was one of the major events in the history of modern logic.

Russell's First World War politics — his vocal opposition to the war — cost him his Trinity fellowship in 1916 and led to a six-month prison sentence in 1918. He continued to write during these years, producing Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) while in prison.

The interwar years included work in the philosophy of mind (The Analysis of Mind, 1921; The Analysis of Matter, 1927), the popular Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), and the experimental Beacon Hill School that Russell and his second wife Dora ran from 1927 to 1932. The personal life was tumultuous — four marriages, numerous affairs, several controversies including the loss of his City College of New York appointment in 1940 over public objections to his views on marriage and sexuality.

Russell returned to Trinity in 1944 and remained associated with Cambridge for the rest of his life. The History of Western Philosophy (1945), undertaken to support himself after the New York debacle, became an unexpected bestseller. The Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1950. The late decades were dominated by political engagement — the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto on nuclear disarmament, the founding of the Committee of 100 for nonviolent resistance, the 1966 International War Crimes Tribunal on the Vietnam War.

Russell died in 1970 at age 97 at Plas Penrhyn in Wales. The three-volume Autobiography (1967–1969) gives the most extensive personal record of any twentieth-century philosopher.

The problem he worked on

Russell's intellectual project, especially in the early and middle periods, was the development of a rigorous logical and epistemological framework that could replace the systematic Idealism of his Cambridge teachers and could ground both mathematics and the natural sciences in a thoroughly empiricist epistemology. The framework was supposed to be sufficient for the foundations of mathematics (the logicist program inherited from Frege), for the analysis of language (the theory of descriptions and the related work), and for the construction of the physical world from the basic data of immediate experience (the project of logical atomism and the later neutral monism).

The organizing methodological commitment was analysis — the breaking down of complex statements and complex theories into their logically simpler constituents and the rigorous examination of those constituents. The method became a defining feature of the entire analytic tradition; Russell's specific applications produced the technical machinery (the theory of descriptions, the theory of types, logical atomism, the constructive program) that shaped early-twentieth-century philosophy across multiple subfields.

Contributions

Principia Mathematica

The three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), coauthored with Alfred North Whitehead, is the major monument of the logicist program. The work attempts the systematic derivation of mathematics from logic, executed in a formal system designed to avoid the paradox Russell had discovered in Frege's earlier system. The technical apparatus — the theory of types, the axioms of reducibility and infinity, the use of contextual definitions for descriptions — is substantial.

The verdict on the logicist program is mixed. The technical achievement of producing a formal system within which large portions of mathematics could be derived was substantial; the philosophical claim that mathematics is thereby reduced to logic is more contested. Gödel's incompleteness theorems (1931) showed that the Principia system (like any sufficiently strong consistent formal system) is necessarily incomplete; the Russell-Whitehead axioms (especially the axiom of reducibility) are difficult to defend as purely logical; the post-Gödelian work in the foundations of mathematics has moved away from logicism toward set-theoretic foundations.

But the technical machinery survived and is essential to the development of twentieth-century mathematical logic; the methodological precedent of treating mathematical foundations as a serious philosophical project has been continuously influential.

The theory of descriptions

The 1905 paper On Denoting introduced the theory of descriptions — Russell's most influential single contribution to the philosophy of language. The problem the paper addresses: definite descriptions of the form the F (the present king of France, the author of Waverley) appear to be referring expressions, but the apparent reference fails when there is no F or when the F is being identified for the first time. Frege's solution (treating the description as a constituent of a complex proposition with sense but possibly no reference) Russell rejected as introducing problematic non-existent objects into the ontology.

Russell's alternative analysis treats the F is G as having the logical form there is exactly one F, and it is G (or in symbolic form, $exists x (Fx land forall y (Fy to y = x) land Gx)$). The description disappears from the logical form; the apparent reference is dissolved into existential and uniqueness claims. The analysis handles non-referring descriptions (the present king of France is bald is false because the existential clause is false) and provides a uniform treatment of definite descriptions across all contexts.

The theory of descriptions has been continuously influential and continuously contested. F. P. Ramsey called it that paradigm of philosophy; many subsequent analytic philosophers have treated it as a model of how philosophical analysis should proceed. The contemporary literature (Strawson's On Referring, 1950; the contemporary work on definite descriptions) continues to engage Russell's specific proposal.

Logical atomism

The lectures The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (delivered 1918, published 1918–1919) develop Russell's most extensive systematic metaphysical position. The world consists of atomic facts corresponding to atomic propositions; complex facts and complex propositions are constructed from these atomic constituents by the logical operations of conjunction, disjunction, negation, and quantification. The analysis of language tracks the structure of the world; the logical structure of a fully analyzed language would mirror the structure of reality.

The position was influenced by Wittgenstein's Tractatus (composed during the war years and published 1921); Russell wrote the introduction to the first edition of the Tractatus and engaged its logical atomism extensively. The position has been continuously contested; Russell himself modified it in the later Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948).

Public philosophy and political engagement

Russell's public engagement is one of the most extensive of any twentieth-century philosopher. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927) is one of the most-read works of philosophical atheism. Marriage and Morals (1929) provoked controversy and contributed to Russell losing the City College of New York appointment in 1940. The political engagement — the First World War opposition, the interwar opposition to fascism, the post-war engagement with nuclear disarmament through the Pugwash conferences and the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, the engagement with the Vietnam War through the International War Crimes Tribunal — made Russell a public figure of a kind few academic philosophers have matched.

The History of Western Philosophy (1945) is the most-read general history of philosophy of the twentieth century. Its judgments are often partial (Russell on Hegel is notoriously dismissive; on Aristotle, often cursory) but the prose is sustained and accessible in ways the more careful but more technical alternatives are not.

Key works

• The Principles of Mathematics (1903). The early statement of the logicist program.
• On Denoting (1905). The theory of descriptions.
• Principia Mathematica (with Whitehead, three volumes, 1910–1913). The systematic execution of logicism.
• The Problems of Philosophy (1912). The short introduction.
• Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). The early version of the constructive program.
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919). The accessible companion to Principia.
• The Analysis of Mind (1921). The neutral monist account of mind.
• The Analysis of Matter (1927). The companion volume on the physical world.
• Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
• An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940)
• A History of Western Philosophy (1945)
• Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948)
• Autobiography (three volumes, 1967–1969)

The standard scholarly edition is The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell edited by John G. Slater and others (Routledge/McMaster, 30+ projected volumes, begun 1983); the Russell Archives at McMaster University in Hamilton hold the major scholarly resources.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: G. E. Moore (whose 1898 break with idealism Russell joined); Frege (the major influence on Russell's logical work after 1900); the British empiricist tradition through Locke, Hume, and Mill (his godfather); Whitehead (his collaborator on Principia and intellectual partner); the late-Victorian liberal intellectual culture in which he was raised; Leibniz (the subject of his first major scholarly work).

Influenced: Wittgenstein (his student at Cambridge from 1911); F. P. Ramsey (his Cambridge student); the entire Vienna Circle (especially through Principia Mathematica and the constructive program in Our Knowledge of the External World); A. J. Ayer (whose Language, Truth and Logic extends Russell's empiricism); W. V. O. Quine (whose technical work develops Russell's logical apparatus); the broader analytic tradition through the twentieth century; the secular humanist movement through Why I Am Not a Christian and related work; the international anti-nuclear movement through the Pugwash conferences and related engagement.

Reception

Russell's contemporary reception was across multiple areas. The early logical work was immediately recognized as major (G. H. Hardy's review of Principles of Mathematics in 1903 was effusive; Frege's recognition of the Russell paradox in 1902 marked Russell's arrival on the foundations of mathematics). The public visibility through the popular books, the political engagement, and the autobiographical writing made Russell the most publicly recognized philosopher of his era.

The philosophical reception has been mixed in the longer term. The theory of descriptions has been continuously engaged and continuously contested; the logicist program is historical now; logical atomism has been superseded by later developments; the empiricist epistemology is one of several twentieth-century empiricisms but not the dominant one. The History of Western Philosophy has been criticized by historians of philosophy as partial and uncharitable to many figures.

The contemporary scholarly engagement is across all these areas, with the work of the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project at McMaster, the journal Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, and major monographs by Nicholas Griffin, Ray Monk (whose two-volume biography is the standard, 1996, 2000), Ronald Jager, A. C. Grayling, and others.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Ray Monk's two-volume biography Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996) and Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness (2000), Nicholas Griffin's Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship (1991), A. C. Grayling's Russell: A Very Short Introduction (2002) and broader engagement, Peter Hylton's Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (1990), and the work of Andrew Irvine, James Levine, and Bernard Linsky. Active scholarly debates concern the precise interpretation of the theory of descriptions and its relation to later developments, the philosophical status of the logicist program in light of subsequent foundational work, the relationship between Russell and Wittgenstein (especially over the Tractatus), and the assessment of Russell's broader public philosophy and political engagement.

Further reading

• Analytic Philosophy — the tradition Russell co-founded
• Frege — the predecessor whose logicist program Russell inherited and revised
• Wittgenstein — his Cambridge student whose Tractatus influenced him
• Leibniz — the subject of his early major scholarly work
• Hume — the empiricist predecessor whose tradition Russell continued

The British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual whose work shaped twentieth-century analytic philosophy more than any other single figure.