Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and social critic whose work reshaped the foundations of modern analytic philosophy. Born Bertrand Arthur William Russell in 1872 at Ravenscroft in Monmouthshire, Wales, he was the grandson of the former Prime Minister Lord John Russell and inherited the title third Earl Russell in 1931.

Orphaned young, he was raised by his grandmother and tutors before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and moral sciences. With Alfred North Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913, an attempt to derive all of mathematics from logical axioms. His earlier paradox concerning the set of all sets that do not contain themselves had already forced a reconstruction of set theory.

Russell's philosophical writings ranged from technical works such as The Principles of Mathematics and Our Knowledge of the External World to broadly accessible books including The Problems of Philosophy and A History of Western Philosophy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.

A pacifist during the First World War, he was dismissed from Trinity and briefly imprisoned. In later decades he campaigned against nuclear weapons, co-founding with Albert Einstein the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955 and presiding over the Pugwash Conferences. He died at his home in Wales in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven.

The name Bertrand comes from Germanic elements meaning bright and shield, and was carried into French and English through medieval Norman use. He carried that sense of bright defense across nearly a century of philosophical and political life.