Bertrand Russel is an icon of the 20th century. For many people, he represents the best of contemporary British philosophy: Empiricism, realism, agnostism and a "cool" rational liberalism on the world issues. His attacks on the morality of christianity are also famous and he got into troubles for that. Last but not least, as a pacifist, he also defended the duty of defeating Hitler acknowledging that war against the Nazis were a last resort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_RusselAnalytic philosophyRussell is generally recognised as one of the founders of
analytic philosophy, even of its several branches. At the beginning of the 20th century, alongside
G. E. Moore, Russell was largely responsible for the British "revolt against
Idealism", a philosophy greatly influenced by
Georg Hegel and his British apostle,
F. H. Bradley. This revolt was echoed 30 years later in
Vienna by the
logical positivists' "revolt against metaphysics". Russell was particularly appalled by the
idealist doctrine of internal
relations, which held that in order to know any particular thing, we must know all of its relations. Russell showed that this would make
space,
time,
science and the concept of
number unintelligible. Russell's logical work with
Whitehead continued this project.
Russell and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as
meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy, and they sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact
language and by breaking down philosophical
propositions into their simplest components. Russell, in particular, saw logic and
science as the principal tools of the philosopher. Indeed, unlike most philosophers who preceded him and his early contemporaries, Russell did not believe there was a separate method for philosophy. He believed that the main task of the philosopher was to illuminate the most general propositions about the
world and to eliminate confusion. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of
metaphysics. Russell adopted
William of Ockham's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities,
Occam's Razor, as a central part of the method of analysis. [
citation needed]
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EpistemologyRussell's
epistemology went through many phases. Once he shed
neo-Hegelianism in his early years, Russell remained a philosophical
realist for the remainder of his life, believing that our direct experiences have primacy in the acquisition of knowledge. While some of his views have lost favour, his influence remains strong in the distinction between two ways in which we can be familiar with objects: "
knowledge by acquaintance" and "
knowledge by description". For a time, Russell thought that we could only be acquainted with our own
sense data—momentary
perceptions of
colours,
sounds, and the like—and that everything else, including the
physical objects that these were sense data of, could only be inferred, or reasoned to—i.e. known by description—and not known directly. This distinction has gained much wider application, though Russell eventually rejected the idea of an intermediate sense datum.
In his later philosophy, Russell subscribed to a kind of
neutral monism, maintaining that the distinctions between the
material and
mental worlds, in the final analysis, were arbitrary, and that both can be reduced to a neutral property—a view similar to one held by the American philosopher,
William James, and one that was first formulated by
Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly admired. Instead of James' "pure experience", however, Russell characterised the stuff of our initial states of perception as "events", a stance which is curiously akin to his old teacher
Whitehead's process philosophy.
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EthicsWhile Russell wrote a great deal on ethical subject matters, he did not believe that the subject belonged to philosophy or that when he wrote on ethics that he did so in his capacity as a philosopher. In his earlier years, Russell was greatly influenced by
G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Along with Moore, he then believed that moral facts were objective, but only known through
intuition, and that they were simple properties of objects, not
equivalent (e.g., pleasure is good) to the natural objects to which they are often ascribed (see
Naturalistic fallacy), and that these simple, undefinable moral properties cannot be analyzed using the non-moral properties with which they are associated. In time, however, he came to agree with his philosophical
hero,
David Hume, who believed that ethical terms dealt with
subjective values that cannot be verified in the same way that matters of fact are. Coupled with Russell's other doctrines, this influenced the
logical positivists, who formulated the theory of
emotivism, which states that ethical propositions (along with those of
metaphysics) were essentially meaningless and nonsensical or, at best, little more than expressions of
attitudes and
preferences. Notwithstanding his influence on them, Russell himself did not construe ethical propositions as narrowly as the positivists, for he believed that ethical considerations are not only meaningful, but that they are a vital subject matter for
civil discourse. Indeed, though Russell was often characterised as the
patron saint of rationality, he agreed with
Hume, who said that reason ought to be subordinate to ethical considerations.
Russell wrote some books about practical ethical issues such as marriage. His opinions on this field are liberal. He argues that sexual relationships outside of marriages are acceptable. In his book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), he advocates in favor of the view that we should see moral issues from the point of view of the desires of individuals. Individuals are allowed to do what they desire, as long as there are no conflicting desires among different individuals. Desires are not bad, in and of themselves, but on occasion, their potential or actual consequences are. Russell also writes that punishment is important only in an instrumental sense. Thus we should not punish someone solely for the sake of punishment.
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Logical atomismPerhaps Russell's most systematic, metaphysical treatment of philosophical analysis and his empiricist-centric logicism is evident in what he called
Logical atomism, which is explicated in a set of
lectures, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," which he gave in
1918. In these lectures, Russell sets forth his
concept of an
ideal,
isomorphic language, one that would mirror the world, whereby our knowledge can be reduced to terms of
atomic propositions and their
truth-functional compounds. Logical atomism is a form of radical empiricism, for Russell believed the most important requirement for such an ideal language is that every meaningful proposition must consist of terms referring directly to the objects with which we are acquainted, or that they are defined by other terms referring to objects with which we are acquainted. Russell excluded certain formal, logical terms such as all, the, is, and so forth, from his isomorphic requirement, but he was never entirely satisfied about our understanding of such terms. One of the central themes of Russell's atomism is that the world consists of logically independent facts, a plurality of facts, and that our knowledge depends on the data of our direct experience of them. In his later life, Russell came to doubt aspects of logical atomism, especially his principle of isomorphism, though he continued to believe that the process of philosophy ought to consist of breaking things down into their simplest components, even though we might not ever fully arrive at an ultimate
atomic fact.
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Logic and philosophy of mathematicsRussell had great influence on modern
mathematical logic. The American philosopher and logician
Willard Quine said Russell's work represented the greatest influence on his own work.
Russell's first mathematical book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, was published in
1897. This work was heavily influenced by
Immanuel Kant. Russell soon realised that the conception it laid out would have made
Albert Einstein's schema of
space-time impossible, which he understood to be superior to his own system. Thenceforth, he rejected the entire
Kantian program as it related to mathematics and
geometry, and he maintained that his own earliest work on the subject was nearly without value.
Interested in the definition of
number, Russell studied the work of
George Boole,
Georg Cantor, and
Augustus De Morgan, while materials in the Bertrand Russell Archives at
McMaster University include notes of his reading in algebraic logic by
Charles S. Peirce and
Ernst Schröder. He became convinced that the foundations of mathematics were tied to logic, and following
Gottlob Frege took an extensionalist approach in which logic was in turn based upon set theory. In
1900 he attended the first
International Congress of Philosophy in
Paris where he became familiar with the work of the Italian mathematician,
Giuseppe Peano. He mastered Peano's new symbolism and his set of
axioms for
arithmetic. Peano was able to define logically all of the terms of these axioms with the exception of 0, number, successor, and the singular term, the. Russell took it upon himself to find logical definitions for each of these. Between 1897 and 1903 he published several articles applying Peano's notation to the classical Boole-Schröder algebra of relations, among them On the Notion of Order, Sur la logique des relations avec les applications à la théorie des séries, and On Cardinal Numbers.
Russell eventually discovered that
Gottlob Frege had independently arrived at equivalent definitions for 0, successor, and number, and the definition of number is now usually referred to as the Frege-Russell definition. It was largely Russell who brought Frege to the attention of the English-speaking world. He did this in
1903, when he published
The Principles of Mathematics, in which the concept of class is inextricably tied to the definition of number. The appendix to this work detailed a paradox arising in Frege's application of second- and higher-order functions which took first-order functions as their arguments, and he offered his first effort to resolve what would henceforth come to be known as the Russell Paradox. In writing Principles, Russell came across Cantor's proof that there was no greatest
cardinal number, which Russell believed was mistaken. The Cantor Paradox in turn was shown (for example by Crossley) to be a special case of the Russell Paradox. This caused Russell to analyze
classes, for it was known that given any number of elements, the number of classes they result in is greater than their number. In turn, this led to the discovery of a very interesting class, namely, the class of all classes, which consists of two kinds of classes: classes that are members of themselves, and classes that are not members of themselves, which led him to find that the so-called principle of extensionality, taken for granted by logicians of the time, was fatally flawed, and that it resulted in a contradiction, whereby Y is a member of Y, if and only if, Y is not a member of Y. This has become known as
Russell's paradox, the solution to which he outlined in an appendix to Principles, and which he later developed into a complete theory, the
Theory of types. Aside from exposing a major inconsistency in
naive set theory, Russell's work led directly to the creation of modern
axiomatic set theory. It also crippled Frege's project of reducing arithmetic to logic. The Theory of Types and much of Russell's subsequent work have also found practical applications with
computer science and
information technology.
Russell continued to defend
logicism, the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic, and along with his former teacher,
Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the monumental
Principia Mathematica, an
axiomatic system on which all of mathematics can be built. The first volume of the Principia was published in
1910, which is largely ascribed to Russell. More than any other single work, it established the specialty of mathematical or symbolic logic. Two more volumes were published, but their original plan to incorporate geometry in a fourth volume was never realised, and Russell never felt up to improving the original works, though he referenced new developments and problems in his preface to the second edition. Upon completing the Principia, three volumes of extraordinarily
abstract and complex reasoning, Russell was exhausted, and he never felt his intellectual faculties fully recovered from the effort. Although the Principia did not fall prey to the
paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by
Kurt Gödel that neither Principia Mathematica, nor any other consistent system of primitive recursive arithmetic, could, within that system, determine that every proposition that could be formulated within that system was decidable, i.e. could decide whether that proposition or its negation was provable within the system (
Gödel's incompleteness theorem).
Russell's last significant work in mathematics and logic, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, was written by hand while he was in
jail for his
anti-war activities during
World War I. This was largely an explication of his previous work and its philosophical significance.
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Philosophy of languageRussell was not the first philosopher to suggest that language had an important bearing on how we understand the world; however, more than anyone before him, Russell made language, or more specifically, how we use language, a central part of philosophy. Had there been no Russell, it seems unlikely that philosophers such as
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Gilbert Ryle,
J. L. Austin, and
P. F. Strawson, among others, would have embarked upon the same course, for so much of what they did was to amplify or respond, sometimes critically, to what Russell had said before them, using many of the techniques that he originally developed. Russell, along with Moore, shared the idea that clarity of expression is a virtue, a notion that has been a touchstone for philosophers ever since, particularly among those who deal with the philosophy of language.
Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to
philosophy of language is his
theory of descriptions, as presented in his seminal essay, "On Denoting", first published in
1905, which the mathematician and philosopher
Frank P. Ramsey described as "a paradigm of philosophy." The theory is normally illustrated using the phrase "the present King of France", as in "The present
king of
France is bald." What object is this
proposition about, given that there is not, at present, a king of France? (Roughly the same problem would arise if there were two kings of France at present: which of them does "the king of France" denote?)
Alexius Meinong had suggested that we must posit a realm of "nonexistent entities" that we can suppose we are referring to when we use expressions such as this; but this would be a strange
theory, to say the least.
Frege, employing his distinction between sense and reference, suggested that such sentences, although meaningful, were neither true nor false. But some such propositions, such as "If the present king of France is bald, then the present king of France has no hair on his head," seem not only truth-valuable but indeed obviously true.
The problem is general to what are called "
definite descriptions." Normally this includes all terms beginning with "the", and sometimes includes names, like "Walter Scott." (This point is quite contentious: Russell sometimes thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called names at all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much subsequent work has treated them as altogether different things.) What is the "logical form" of definite descriptions: how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them in order to show how the
truth of the whole depends on the truths of the parts? Definite descriptions appear to be like names that by their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more or less. What, then, are we to say about the proposition as a whole if one of its parts apparently isn't functioning correctly?
Russell's
solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term alone but the entire proposition that contained a definite description. "The present king of France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each definite description in fact contains a claim of
existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the obvious content of the proposition. The proposition as a whole then says three things about some object: the definite description contains two of them, and the rest of the
sentence contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be
false, not meaningless.
One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does. Strawson also claims that a denoting phrase that does not, in fact, denote anything could be supposed to follow the role of a "Widgy's inverted truth-value" and expresses the opposite meaning of the intended phrase. This can be shown using the example of "The present king of France is bald". Taken with the inverted truth-value methodology the meaning of this sentence becomes "It is true that there is no present king of France who is bald" which changes the denotation of 'the present king of France' from a primary denotation to a secondary one.
Wittgenstein, Russell's student, later achieved considerable prominence in the philosophy of language. Russell thought Wittgenstein's elevation of
language as the only
reality with which philosophy need be concerned was absurd, and he decried his influence and the influence of his followers, especially members of the so-called "Oxford school" of
ordinary language philosophy, who he believed were promoting a kind of
mysticism. Russell's belief that there is more to philosophy and knowing the world than simply understanding how we use language has regained prominence in philosophy and eclipsed Wittgenstein's language-centric views.
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Philosophy of scienceRussell frequently claimed that he was more convinced of his method of doing philosophy, the method of analysis, than of his philosophical conclusions. Science, of course, was one of the principal components of analysis, along with logic and mathematics. While Russell was a believer in the
scientific method, knowledge derived from
empirical research that is verified through repeated testing, he believed that science reaches only tentative answers, and that scientific progress is piecemeal, and attempts to find organic unities were largely futile. Indeed, he believed the same was true of philosophy. Another founder of
modern philosophy of science,
Ernst Mach, placed less reliance on method, per se, for he believed that any method that produced predictable results was satisfactory and that the principal role of the
scientist was to make successful
predictions. While Russell would doubtless agree with this as a practical matter, he believed that the ultimate objective of both science and philosophy was to understand
reality, not simply to make predictions.
The fact that Russell made science a central part of his method and of philosophy was instrumental in making the
philosophy of science a full-blooded, separate branch of philosophy and an area in which subsequent philosophers specialised. Much of Russell's thinking about science is exposed in his
1914 book, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. Among the several schools that were influenced by Russell were the
logical positivists, particularly
Rudolph Carnap, who maintained that the distinguishing feature of scientific propositions was their verifiability. This contrasted with the theory of
Karl Popper, also greatly influenced by Russell, who believed that their importance rested in the fact that they were potentially falsifiable.
It is worth noting that outside of his strictly philosophical pursuits, Russell was always fascinated by science, particularly
physics, and he even authored several popular science books, The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925).
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Religion and theologyRussell's ethical outlook and his personal
courage in facing controversies were certainly informed by his
religious upbringing, principally by his paternal grandmother, who instructed him with the
Biblical injunction, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil" (
Exodus 23:2), something he said influenced him throughout his life.
For most of his adult life, however, Russell thought it very unlikely that there was a
god, and he maintained that
religion is little more than
superstition and, despite any positive effects that religion might have, it is largely harmful to people. He believed religion and the religious outlook (he considered
communism and other systematic
ideologies to be species of religion) serve to impede knowledge, foster
fear and dependency, and are responsible for much of the
war, oppression, and misery that have beset the world.
In his 1949 speech, "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?", Russell expressed his difficulty over whether to call himself an
atheist or an
agnostic:
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
— Bertrand Russell, Collected Papers, vol. 11, p. 91
Russell also made an influential analysis of the
omphalos hypothesis enunciated by
Philip Henry Gosse—that any argument suggesting that the world was created as if it were already in motion could just as easily make it a few minutes old as a few thousand years:
There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
— Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 1921, pp. 159–60; cf. Philosophy, Norton, 1927, p. 7, where Russell acknowledges Gosse's paternity of this anti-evolutionary argument.
As a young man, Russell had a decidedly religious bent, himself, as is evident in his early
Platonism. He longed for
eternal truths, as he makes clear in his famous essay, "A Free Man's Worship", widely regarded as a masterpiece in prose, but one that Russell came to dislike. While he rejected the
supernatural, he freely admitted that he yearned for a deeper meaning to life.
Russell's views on religion can be found in his popular book,
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (
ISBN 0671203231), whose title essay was a talk given
March 6,
1927 at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices of the
South London Branch of the
National Secular Society, UK. The speech was published later that year as a
pamphlet, which, along with other essays, was eventually published as a book. In the book, Russell considers a number of logical
arguments for the existence of God, including the
first cause argument, the
natural-law argument, the
argument from design, and moral arguments. He also goes into specifics about
Christian theology.
His final conclusion:
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. ... A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
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Influence on philosophyIt would be difficult to overstate Russell's influence on modern philosophy, especially in the
English-speaking world. While others were also influential, notably, Frege, Moore, and Wittgenstein, more than any other person, Russell made analysis the dominant approach to philosophy. Moreover, he is the founder or, at the very least, the prime mover of its major branches and themes, including several versions of the philosophy of language, formal logical analysis, and the philosophy of science. The various analytic movements throughout the last century all owe something to Russell's earlier works.
Russell's influence on individual philosophers is singular, and perhaps most notably in the case of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was his student between
1911 and
1914. It should also be observed that Wittgenstein exerted considerable influence on Russell, especially in leading him to conclude, much to his regret, that mathematical truths were trivial, tautological truths. Evidence of Russell's influence on Wittgenstein can be seen throughout the
Tractatus, which Russell was responsible for having published. Russell also helped to secure Wittgenstein's
doctorate and a faculty position at
Cambridge, along with several fellowships along the way. However, as previously stated, he came to disagree with Wittgenstein's later linguistic and analytic approach to philosophy, while Wittgenstein came to think of Russell as "superficial and glib," particularly in his popular writings. Russell's influence is also evident in the work of
A. J. Ayer,
Rudolph Carnap,
Kurt Gödel,
Karl Popper,
W. V. Quine, and a number of other philosophers and logicians.
Some see Russell's influence as mostly negative, primarily those who have been critical of Russell's emphasis on science and logic, the consequent diminishment of metaphysics, and of his insistence that ethics lies outside of philosophy. Russell's admirers and detractors are often more acquainted with his pronouncements on social and political matters, or what some (e.g.,
Ray Monk) have called his "
journalism," than they are with his technical, philosophical work. Among non-philosophers, there is a marked tendency to conflate these matters, and to judge Russell the philosopher on what he himself would certainly consider to be his non-philosophical opinions. Russell often cautioned people to make this distinction.
Russell left a large assortment of writing. Since adolescence, Russell wrote about 3,000 words a day, in long hand, with relatively few corrections; his first draft nearly always was his last draft, even on the most complex, technical matters. His previously unpublished work is an immense treasure trove, and scholars are continuing to gain new insights into Russell's thought.
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Russell's activismPolitical and social
activism occupied much of Russell's time for most of his long life, which makes his prodigious and seminal writing on a wide range of technical and non-technical subjects all the more remarkable.
Russell remained politically active to the end, writing and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. Some maintain that during his last few years he gave his youthful followers too much license and that they used his name for some outlandish purposes that a more attentive Russell would not have approved. There is evidence to show that he became aware of this when he fired his private secretary,
Ralph Schoenman, then a young firebrand of the radical left.
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Pacifism, war and nuclear weaponsWhile never a complete
pacifist (in 'The Ethics of War', an article published in 1915, Russell stated that colonial wars were legitimate where the side with the stronger culture could put the land to better use), Russell opposed British participation in
World War I. As a result, he was first fined, then lost his professorship at
Trinity College,
Cambridge, and was later imprisoned for six months. In 1943 Russell called his stance "relative political pacifism"—he held that war was always a great
evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances (such as when
Adolf Hitler threatened to take over Europe) it might be a lesser of multiple evils. In the years leading to
World War II, he supported the policy of
appeasement; but by 1940 he acknowledged that in order to preserve democracy,
Hitler had to be defeated.
Russell was a prominent opponent of nuclear weapons. On
November 20,
1948, in a public speech at
Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive nuclear strike on the
Soviet Union was justified. Russell argued that the threat of war between the
United States and the
Soviet Union would enable the United States to force the Soviet Union to accept the
Baruch Plan for international atomic energy control. (Earlier in the year he had written in the same vein to
Walter W. Marseille.) Russell felt this plan "had very great merits and showed considerable generosity, when it is remembered that America still had an unbroken nuclear monopoly." (Has Man a Future?, 1961). Russell later relented from this stance, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear powers, possibly linked to some form of
world government.
In
1955 Russell released the
Russell-Einstein Manifesto, co-signed by
Albert Einstein and nine other leading scientists and intellectuals, which led to the first of the
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in
1957. In
1958, Russell became the first president of the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He resigned two years later when the CND would not support
civil disobedience, and formed the
Committee of 100. In
1961, when he was in his late eighties, he was imprisoned for a week for inciting civil disobedience, in connection with protests at the
Ministry of Defence and
Hyde Park.
Russell made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war
Bollywood film "Aman" which was released in India in 1967. This was Russell's only appearance in a feature film.
The
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation began work in
1963, in order to carry forward Russell's work for peace, human rights and social justice. He opposed the
Vietnam War and, along with
Jean-Paul Sartre, he organised a
tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes; this came to be known as the
Russell Tribunal.
Russell was an early critic of the official story in the
John F. Kennedy assassination; his "
16 Questions on the Assassination" from
1964 is still considered a good summary of the apparent inconsistencies in that case.
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Communism and socialismRussell visited the
Soviet Union and met
Lenin in
1920, and on his return wrote a critical tract,
The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. He was unimpressed with the result of the
communist revolution, and said he was "infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere—stifled by its utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse." He believed Lenin to be similar to a religious
zealot, cold and possessed of "no love of liberty."
Politically, Russell envisioned a kind of benevolent,
democratic socialism, not unlike the conception promoted by the
Fabian Society. He was extremely critical of the
totalitarianism exhibited by
Stalin's regime, and of
Marxism and
communism generally. Russell was an enthusiast for
world government, and advocated the establishment of an international or world government in some of the essays collected in In Praise of Idleness (
1935), and also in Has Man a Future? (
1961).
One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.
— Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920
For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.
— Bertrand Russell, "The Case for Socialism" (In Praise of Idleness, 1935)
Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.
— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935
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Women's suffrageAs a young man, Russell was a member of the
Liberal Party and wrote in favor of free trade and women's suffrage. In his
1910 pamphlet, Anti-Suffragist Anxieties, Russell wrote that some men opposed suffrage because they "fear that their liberty to act in ways that are injurious to women will be curtailed." In
1907 he was nominated by the National Union of Suffrage Societies to run for
Parliament in a
by-election, which he lost by a wide margin.
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SexualityRussell wrote against
Victorian notions of morality.
Marriage and Morals (1929) expressed his opinion that sex between a man and woman who are not married to each other is not necessarily immoral if they truly love one another, and advocated "trial marriages" or "companionate marriage", formalised relationships whereby young people could legitimately have sexual intercourse without being expected to remain married in the long term or to have children (an idea first proposed by Judge
Ben Lindsey). This might not seem extreme by today's standards, but it was enough to raise vigorous protests and denunciations against him during his visit to the
United States shortly after the book's publication. Russell was also ahead of his time in advocating open
sex education and widespread access to
contraception. He also advocated easy
divorce, but only if the marriage had produced no children - Russell's view was that parents should remain married but tolerant of each other's sexual infidelity, if they had children. This reflected his life at the time - his second wife Dora was openly having an affair, and would soon become pregnant by another man, but Russell was keen for their children John and Kate to have a "normal" family life.
Russell's private life was even more unconventional and freewheeling than his published writings revealed, but that was not well known at the time. For example, philosopher
Sidney Hook reports that Russell often spoke of his
sexual prowess and of his various conquests.
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Eugenics and raceSome critics of Russell have pointed out racist passages in his early writings, as well as his initial praise for the then-fashionable idea of
eugenics. For example, in early editions of his book Marriage and Morals (1929) he asserted:
In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another.... It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable.
— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (1929)
Later in his life, Russell criticized eugenic programs for their vulnerability to corruption, and by 1932 he was to condemn the "unwarranted assumption" that "Negroes are congenitally inferior to white men" (Education and the Social Order, Chap. 3). Racism rapidly declined in acceptance throughout the second half of the 20th century. In fact, Russell seems to have been one of the leaders of change in this sphere. He wrote a chapter on "Racial Antagonism" in New Hopes for a Changing World (1951):
It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions.
— Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951, p. 108)
There is a much later condemnation-in-passing of racism in Russell's "
16 Questions on the Assassination" (1964), in which he mentions "Senator Russell of Georgia and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana ... whose racist views have brought shame on the United States".
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Russell summing up his life
Admitting to failure in helping the world to conquer
war and in winning his perpetual intellectual battle for eternal truths, Russell wrote this in "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday", which also served as the last entry in the last volume of his
autobiography, published in his 98th year:
I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.
— Bertrand Russell, "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday"
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Comments about Russell
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As a man
"Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man."
— A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, NY: Viking Press, 1972.
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As a philosopher
"It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Russell's thought dominated twentieth century analytic philosophy: virtually every strand in its development either originated with him or was transformed by being transmitted through him. Analytic philosophy itself owes its existence more to Russell than to any other philosopher."
— Nicholas Griffin, The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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As a writer and his place in history
"Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings."
— Sidney Hook, Out of Step, An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, NY: Carol & Graff, 1988.
"Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red—and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue—and no one should be allowed to read them."
— Rush Rhees, Recollections of Wittgenstein, Oxford Paperbacks, 1984.
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As a mathematician and logician
Of the Principia: "...its enduring value was simply a deeper understanding of the central concepts of mathematics and their basic laws and interrelationships. Their total translatability into just elementary logic and a simple familiar two-place predicate, membership, is of itself a philosophical sensation."
— W.V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
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As an activist
"Oh, Bertrand Russell! Oh, Hewlett Johnson! Where, oh where, was your flaming conscience at that time?"
— Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row, 1974.
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As a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature
In other words, it was specifically not for his incontestably great contributions to philosophy—The Principles of Mathematics, 'On Denoting' and Principia Mathematica—that he was being honoured, but for the later work that his fellow philosophers were unanimous in regarding as inferior.
— Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, The Ghost of Madness, p. 332.
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From a daughter
"He was the most fascinating man I have ever known, the only man I ever loved, the greatest man I shall ever meet, the wittiest, the gayest, the most charming. It was a privilege to know him, and I thank God he was my father."
— Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 202.
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Quotations
"War does not determine who is right. Only who is left." (Times Newspaper Interview 1947)
"The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible." (Source: Alan Wood, Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic, 1957)
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." [
citation needed]
"You could tell by his [
Aldous Huxley] conversation which volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he'd been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath." (Source: Parris, M., Scorn: With Added Vitriol, London: Penguin, 1996, quoting Russell's 1963 letter to Ronald W. Clark)
"A Tale of Two Moralities" "I dislike
Nietzsche," Russell wrote, "because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die." (Source: History of Western Philosophy, chap. on Nietzsche, last par.)
