bertrand russell famous essays

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

41 Bertrand Russell–two essays

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell , 1872 – 1970 CE, was a British philosopher, writer, social critic and political activist. In the early 20th century, Russell led the British “revolt against idealism”.  He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy.  Russell was an anti-war activist and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I.    He did conclude that the war against Adolf Hitler was a necessary “lesser of two evils”  He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 “”in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

In “Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday” (“Postscript” in his  Autobiography ), Russell wrote: “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”.

You might find it interesting to see the two things that he believed he would like to say to a future generation.  It takes less than 2 minutes, but in 1959, this is what Bertrand Russell had to say:

Message to Future Generations

From  Bertrand Russell’s: The Problems of Philosophy: Chapter XV: The Value of Philosophy

This is a short interview with Woodrow Wyatt in 1960, when Russell was 87 years old.

Mankind’s Future and Philosophy

The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests : family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins.

Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife.

One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps—friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad—it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.

The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense organs distort as much as they reveal.

The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man’s deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man’s true freedom, and his liberation from the thralldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Key Takeaway

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied , not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN CONWAY MEMORIAL LECTURE

FREE THOUGHT AND OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA

Delivered at south place institute on march 24, 1922, by the hon. bertrand russell, m.a., f.r.s., (professor graham wallas in the chair), watts & co., johnson’s court, fleet street, e.c.4 1922.

Moncure Conway, in whose honor we are assembled to-day, devoted his life to two great objects: freedom of thought and freedom of the individual.

“In regard to both these objects, something has been gained since his time, but something also has been lost. New dangers, somewhat different in form from those of past ages, threaten both kinds of freedom, and unless a vigorous and vigilant public opinion can be aroused in defense of them, there will be much less of both a hundred years hence than there is now. My purpose in this address is to emphasize the new dangers and to consider how they can be met.

Let us begin by trying to be clear as to what we mean by “free thought.” This expression has two senses.

In its narrower sense it means thought which does not accept the dogmas of traditional religion. In this sense a man is a “free thinker” if he is not a Christian or a Mussulman or a Buddhist or a Shintoist or a member of any of the other bodies of men who accept some inherited orthodoxy. In Christian countries a man is called a “free thinker” if he does not decidedly believe in God, though this would not suffice to make a man a “free thinker” in a Buddhist country.

I do not wish to minimize the importance of free thought in this sense. I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.

But there is also a wider sense of “free thought,” which I regard as of still greater importance. Indeed, the harm done by traditional religions seems chiefly traceable to the fact that they have prevented free thought in this wider sense. The wider sense is not so easy to define as the narrower, and it will be well to spend some little time in trying to arrive at its essence.

To begin with the most obvious. Thought is not “free” when legal penalties are incurred by the holding or not holding of certain opinions, or by giving expression to one’s belief or lack of belief on certain matters. Very few countries in the world have as yet even this elementary kind of freedom.

In England, under the Blasphemy Laws , it is illegal to express disbelief in the Christian religion, though in practice the law is not set in motion against the well-to-do. It is also illegal to teach what Christ taught on the subject of non-resistance. Therefore, whoever wishes to avoid becoming a criminal must profess to agree with Christ’s teaching, but must avoid saying what that teaching was.

In America no one can enter the country without first solemnly declaring that he disbelieves in anarchism and polygamy; and, once inside, he must also disbelieve in communism.

In Japan it is illegal to express disbelief in the divinity of the Mikado . It will thus be seen that a voyage round the world is a perilous adventure.

A Mohammedan, a Tolstoyan, a Bolshevik, or a Christian cannot undertake it without at some point becoming a criminal, or holding his tongue about what he considers important truths. This, of course, applies only to steerage passengers; saloon passengers are allowed to believe whatever they please, provided they avoid offensive obtrusiveness.

Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts . The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search. Both these obstacles exist in every large country known to me, except China, which is the last refuge of freedom. It is these obstacles with which I shall be concerned—their present magnitude, the likelihood of their increase, and the possibility of their diminution.

We may say that thought is free when it is exposed to free competition among beliefs —i.e., when all beliefs are able to state their case, and no legal or pecuniary advantages or disadvantages attach to beliefs. This is an ideal which, for various reasons, can never be fully attained. But it is possible to approach very much nearer to it than we do at present.

Three incidents in my own life will serve to show how, in modern England, the scales are weighted in favor of Christianity. My reason for mentioning them is that many people do not at all realize the disadvantages to which avowed Agnosticism still exposes people.

• The first incident belongs to a very early stage in my life. My father was a Freethinker, but died when I was only three years old. Wishing me to be brought up without superstition, he appointed two Freethinkers as my guardians. The Courts, however, set aside his will, and had me educated in the Christian faith. I am afraid the result was disappointing, but that was not the fault of the law. If he had directed that I should be educated as a Christadelphian or a Muggletonian or a Seventh-Day Adventist, the Courts would not have dreamed of objecting. A parent has a right to ordain that any imaginable superstition shall be instilled into his children after his death, but has not the right to say that they shall be kept free from superstition if possible.
• The second incident occurred in the year 1910 . I had at that time a desire to stand for Parliament as a Liberal, and the Whips recommended me to a certain constituency. I addressed the Liberal Association, who expressed themselves favorably, and my adoption seemed certain. But, on being questioned by a small inner caucus, I admitted that I was an Agnostic. They asked whether the fact would come out, and I said it probably would. They asked whether I should be willing to go to church occasionally, and I replied that I should not. Consequently, they selected another candidate, who was duly elected, has been in Parliament ever since, and is a member of the present Government.
• The third incident occurred immediately afterwards. I was invited by Trinity College, Cambridge, to become a lecturer, but not a Fellow. The difference is not pecuniary; it is that a Fellow has a voice in the government of the College, and cannot be dispossessed during the term of his Fellowship except for grave immorality. The chief reason for not offering me a Fellowship was that the clerical party did not wish to add to the anti-clerical vote. The result was that they were able to dismiss me in 1916, when they disliked my views on the War. If I had been dependent on my lectureship, I should have starved.

These three incidents illustrate different kinds of disadvantages attaching to avowed freethinking even in modern England. Any other avowed Freethinker could supply similar incidents from his personal experience, often of a far more serious character. The net result is that people who are not well-to-do dare not be frank about their religious beliefs.

It is not, of course, only or even chiefly in regard to religion that there is lack of freedom. Belief in communism or free love handicaps a man much more than Agnosticism. Not only is it a disadvantage to hold those views, but it is very much more difficult to obtain publicity for the arguments in their favor. On the other hand, in Russia the advantages and disadvantages are exactly reversed: comfort and power are achieved by professing Atheism, communism, and free love, and no opportunity exists for propaganda against these opinions. The result is that in Russia one set of fanatics feels absolute certainty about one set of doubtful propositions, while in the rest of the world another set of fanatics feels equal certainty about a diametrically opposite set of equally doubtful propositions. From such a situation war, bitterness, and persecution inevitably result on both sides.

Russell was an atheist.  He has specific reasons for this.  Listen to it in his own words:

  Bertrand Russell on Religion

William James used to preach the “will to believe.” For my part, I should wish to preach the “will to doubt.” None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practiced in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge.

Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt.

In religion and politics, on the contrary, though there is as yet nothing approaching scientific knowledge , everybody considers it  de rigueur  to have a dogmatic opinion, to be backed up by inflicting starvation, prison, and war, and to be carefully guarded from argumentative competition with any different opinion. If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about these matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured. War would become impossible, because each side would realize that both sides must be in the wrong. Persecution would cease. Education would aim at expanding the mind, not at narrowing it. Men would be chosen for jobs on account of fitness to do the work, not because they flattered the irrational dogmas of those in power. Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the millennium.

We have had in recent years a brilliant example of the scientific temper of mind in the theory of relativity and its reception by the world. Einstein, a German-Swiss-Jew pacifist, was appointed to a research professorship by the German Government in the early days of the War; his predictions were verified by an English expedition which observed the eclipse of 1919, very soon after the Armistice. His theory upsets the whole theoretical framework of traditional physics; it is almost as damaging to orthodox dynamics as Darwin was to  Genesis . Yet physicists everywhere have shown complete readiness to accept his theory as soon as it appeared that the evidence was in its favor. But none of them, least of all Einstein himself, would claim that he has said the last word. He has not built a monument of infallible dogma to stand for all time. There are difficulties he cannot solve; his doctrines will have to be modified in their turn as they have modified Newton’s. This critical un-dogmatic receptiveness is the true attitude of science.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.

If it is admitted that a condition of rational doubt would be desirable , it becomes important to inquire how it comes about that there is so much irrational certainty in the world. A great deal of this is due to the inherent irrationality and credulity of average human nature. But this seed of intellectual original sin is nourished and fostered by other agencies, among which three play the chief part—namely, education, propaganda, and economic pressure .

Let us consider these in turn.

The committee which framed these laws, as quoted by the  New Republic , laid it down that the teacher who “does not approve of the present social system……must surrender his office,” and that “no person who is not eager to combat the theories of social change should be entrusted with the task of fitting the young and old for the responsibilities of citizenship.”

Thus, according to the law of the State of New York, Christ and George Washington were too degraded morally to be fit for the education of the young . If Christ were to go to New York and say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” the President of the New York School Board would reply: “Sir, I see no evidence that you are eager to combat theories of social change. Indeed, I have heard it said that you advocate what you call the  kingdom  of heaven, whereas this country, thank God, is a republic. It is clear that the Government of your kingdom of heaven would differ materially from that of New York State, therefore no children will be allowed access to you.” If he failed to make this reply, he would not be doing his duty as a functionary entrusted with the administration of the law.

The effect of such laws is very serious. Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that the government and the social system in the State of New York are the best that have ever existed on this planet; yet even then both would presumably be capable of improvement. Any person who admits this obvious proposition is by law incapable of teaching in a State school. Thus the law decrees that the teachers shall all be either hypocrites or fools.

Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party. The persecution of opinion in Russia is more severe than in any capitalist country. I met in Petrograd an eminent Russian poet, Alexander Block, who has since died as the result of privations. The Bolsheviks allowed him to teach æsthetics, but he complained that they insisted on his teaching the subject “from a Marxian point of view.” He had been at a loss to discover how the theory of rhythmics was connected with Marxism, although, to avoid starvation, he had done his best to find out. Of course, it has been impossible in Russia ever since the Bolsheviks came into power to print anything critical of the dogmas upon which their regime is founded.

The examples of America and Russia illustrate the conclusion to which we seem to be driven—namely, that so long as men continue to have the present fanatical belief in the importance of politics free thought on political matters will be impossible, and there is only too much danger that the lack of freedom will spread to all other matters, as it has done in Russia. Only some degree of political skepticism can save us from this misfortune.

It must not be supposed that the officials in charge of education desire the young to become educated. On the contrary, their problem is to impart information without imparting intelligence. Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge—reading and writing, languages and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence. The utility of information is admitted practically as well as theoretically; without a literate population a modern State is impossible. But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties. Only the guardians, in Plato’s language, are to think; the rest are to obey, or to follow leaders like a herd of sheep. This doctrine, often unconsciously, has survived the introduction of political democracy, and has radically vitiated all national systems of education.

Definite mis-statements of fact can be legitimately objected to, but they are by no means necessary. The mere words “Pear’s Soap,” which affirm nothing, cause people to buy that article. If, wherever these words appear, they were replaced by the words “The Labour Party,” millions of people would be led to vote for the Labour Party, although the advertisements had claimed no merit for it whatever. But if both sides in a controversy were confined by law to statements which a committee of eminent logicians considered relevant and valid, the main evil of propaganda, as at present conducted, would remain.

Suppose, under such a law, two parties with an equally good case, one of whom had a million pounds to spend on propaganda, while the other had only a hundred thousand . It is obvious that the arguments in favor of the richer party would become more widely known than those in favor of the poorer party, and therefore the richer party would win. This situation is, of course, intensified when one party is the Government. In Russia the Government has an almost complete monopoly of propaganda, but that is not necessary. The advantages which it possesses over its opponents will generally be sufficient to give it the victory, unless it has an exceptionally bad case.

There are two simple principles which, if they were adopted, would solve almost all social problems.

The first is that education should have for one of its aims to teach people only to believe propositions when there is some reason to think that they are true.

The second is that jobs should be given solely for fitness to do the work.

To take the second point first . The habit of considering a man’s religious, moral, and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution, and it is likely to become quite as efficient as the Inquisition ever was. The old liberties can be legally retained without being of the slightest use. If, in practice, certain opinions lead a man to starve, it is poor comfort to him to know that his opinions are not punishable by law. There is a certain public feeling against starving men for not belonging to the Church of England, or for holding slightly unorthodox opinions in politics. But there is hardly any feeling against the rejection of Atheists or Mormons, extreme communists, or men who advocate free love. Such men are thought to be wicked, and it is considered only natural to refuse to employ them. People have hardly yet waked up to the fact that this refusal, in a highly industrial State, amounts to a very rigorous form of persecution.

If this danger were adequately realized, it would be possible to rouse public opinion , and to secure that a man’s beliefs should not be considered in appointing him to a post. The protection of minorities is vitally important; and even the most orthodox of us may find himself in a minority some day, so that we all have an interest in restraining the tyranny of majorities. Nothing except public opinion can solve this problem. Socialism would make it somewhat more acute, since it would eliminate the opportunities that now arise through exceptional employers. Every increase in the size of industrial undertakings makes it worse, since it diminishes the number of independent employers.

The battle must be fought exactly as the battle of religious toleration was fought. And as in that case, so in this, a decay in the intensity of belief is likely to prove the decisive factor. While men were convinced of the absolute truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, as the case might be, they were willing to persecute on account of them. While men are quite certain of their modern creeds, they will persecute on their behalf. Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, though not to the theory, of toleration.

And this brings me to my other point, which concerns the aims of education.  If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true.

History should be taught in the same way. Napoleon’s campaigns of 1813 and 1814, for instance, might be studied in the  Moniteur , leading up to the surprise which Parisians felt when they saw the Allies arriving under the walls of Paris after they had (according to the official bulletins) been beaten by Napoleon in every battle. In the more advanced classes, students should be encouraged to count the number of times that Lenin has been assassinated by Trotsky, in order to learn contempt for death. Finally, they should be given a school history approved by the Government, and asked to infer what a French school history would say about our wars with France. All this would be a far better training in citizenship than the trite moral maxims by which some people believe that civic duty can be inculcated.

If I am asked how the world is to be induced to adopt these two maxims—namely

(1) that jobs should be given to people on account of their fitness to perform them;

(2) that one aim of education should be to cure people of the habit of believing propositions for which there is no evidence—

I can only say that it must be done by generating an enlightened public opinion . And an enlightened public opinion can only be generated by the efforts of those who desire that it should exist. I do not believe that the economic changes advocated by Socialists will, of themselves, do anything towards curing the evils we have been considering. I think that, whatever happens in politics, the trend of economic development will make the preservation of mental freedom increasingly difficult, unless public opinion insists that the employer shall control nothing in the life of the employee except his work.

Freedom in education could easily be secured, if it were desired , by limiting the function of the State to inspection and payment, and confining inspection rigidly to the definite instruction. But that, as things stand, would leave education in the hands of the Churches, because, unfortunately, they are more anxious to teach their beliefs than Freethinkers are to teach their doubts. It would, however, give a free field, and would make it possible for a liberal education to be given if it were really desired. More than that ought not to be asked of the law.

My plea throughout this address has been for the spread of the scientific temper , which is an altogether different thing from the knowledge of scientific results. The scientific temper is capable of regenerating mankind and providing an issue for all our troubles. The results of science, in the form of mechanism, poison gas, and the yellow press, bid fair to lead to the total downfall of our civilization. It is a curious antithesis, which a Martian might contemplate with amused detachment. But for us it is a matter of life and death. Upon its issue depends the question whether our grandchildren are to live in a happier world, or are to exterminate each other by scientific methods, leaving perhaps to Negroes and Papuans the future destinies of mankind.

If you would like to hear a more thorough interview with Russell, you can find it here at:

  Face to Face Interview with the BBC

Project Gutenberg’s The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Problems of Philosophy

Author: Bertrand Russell

Release Date: May 2, 2009 [EBook #5827]

Last Updated: February 7, 2013 Language: English

Project Gutenberg’s Free Thought and Official Propaganda, by Bertrand Russell

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license

Title: Free Thought and Official Propaganda

Release Date: February 16, 2014 [EBook #44932]

Language: English

Bertrand Russell--two essays Copyright © 2018 by Jody L Ondich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (b.1872 - d.1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic, best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), and his theories of definite descriptions and logical atomism. Along with G.E. Moore, Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Along with Kurt Gödel, he is also regularly credited with being one of the two most important logicians of the twentieth century.

Over the course of his long career, Russell made significant contributions, not just to logic and philosophy, but to a broad range of other subjects including education, history, political theory and religious studies. In addition, many of his writings on a wide variety of topics in both the sciences and the humanities have influenced generations of general readers. After a life marked by controversy (including dismissals from both Trinity College, Cambridge, and City College, New York), Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Also noted for his many spirited anti-war and anti-nuclear protests, Russell remained a prominent public figure until his death at the age of 97.

A Chronology of Russell's Life

Russell's work in logic, russell's work in analytic philosophy, russell's social and political philosophy, russell's writings, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Interested readers may also wish to listen to two sound clips of Russell speaking .

A short chronology of the major events in Russell's life is as follows:

• (1872) Born May 18 at Ravenscroft, Wales.
• (1874) Death of mother and sister.
• (1876) Death of father; Russell's grandfather, Lord John Russell (the former Prime Minister), and grandmother succeed in overturning his father's will to win custody of Russell and his brother.
• (1878) Death of grandfather; Russell's grandmother, Lady Russell, supervises his upbringing.
• (1890) Enters Trinity College, Cambridge.
• (1893) Awarded first class B.A. in Mathematics.
• (1894) Completed the Moral Sciences Tripos (Part II)
• (1894) Marries Alys Pearsall Smith.
• (1900) Meets Peano at International Congress in Paris.
• (1901) Discovers Russell's paradox .
• (1902) Corresponds with Frege.
• (1908) Elected Fellow of the Royal Society.
• (1916) Fined 110 pounds and dismissed from Trinity College as a result of anti-war protests.
• (1918) Imprisoned for five months as a result of anti-war protests.
• (1921) Divorce from Alys and marriage to Dora Black.
• (1927) Opens experimental school with Dora.
• (1931) Becomes the third Earl Russell upon the death of his brother.
• (1935) Divorce from Dora.
• (1936) Marriage to Patricia (Peter) Helen Spence.
• (1940) Appointment at City College New York revoked following public protests.
• (1943) Dismissed from Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania.
• (1949) Awarded the Order of Merit.
• (1950) Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature.
• (1952) Divorce from Peter and marriage to Edith Finch.
• (1955) Releases Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
• (1957) Organizes the first Pugwash Conference.
• (1958) Becomes founding President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
• (1961) Imprisoned for one week in connection with anti-nuclear protests.
• (1970) Dies February 02 at Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales.

For more detailed information about Russell's life, readers are encouraged to consult Russell's four autobiographical volumes, My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959) and The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (3 vols, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967, 1968, 1969). In addition, John Slater's accessible and informative Bertrand Russell (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994) gives an excellent short introduction to Russell's life, work and influence.

Other sources of biographical information include Ronald Clark's The Life of Bertrand Russell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) and Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), and the first volume of A.D. Irvine's Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1999).

For a chronology of Russell's major publications, readers are encouraged to consult Russell's Writings below. For a more complete list see A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (3 vols, London: Routledge, 1994), by Kenneth Blackwell and Harry Ruja. A less detailed, but still comprehensive, list also appears in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell , 3rd edn (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 746-803.

Finally, for a bibliography of the secondary literature surrounding Russell, see A.D. Irvine, Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments , Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 247-312.

Russell's contributions to logic and the foundations of mathematics include his discovery of Russell's paradox , his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is, in some significant sense, reducible to formal logic), his development of the theory of types, and his refining of the first-order predicate calculus.

Russell discovered the paradox that bears his name in 1901, while working on his Principles of Mathematics (1903). The paradox arises in connection with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set, if it exists, will be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. The paradox is significant since, using classical logic, all sentences are entailed by a contradiction. Russell's discovery thus prompted a large amount of work in logic, set theory, and the philosophy and foundations of mathematics.

Russell's own response to the paradox came with the development of his theory of types in 1903. It was clear to Russell that some restrictions needed to be placed upon the original comprehension (or abstraction) axiom of naive set theory, the axiom that formalizes the intuition that any coherent condition may be used to determine a set (or class). Russell's basic idea was that reference to sets such as the set of all sets that are not members of themselves could be avoided by arranging all sentences into a hierarchy, beginning with sentences about individuals at the lowest level, sentences about sets of individuals at the next lowest level, sentences about sets of sets of individuals at the next lowest level, and so on. Using a vicious circle principle similar to that adopted by the mathematician Henri Poincaré, and his own so-called "no class" theory of classes, Russell was able to explain why the unrestricted comprehension axiom fails: propositional functions, such as the function " x is a set," may not be applied to themselves since self-application would involve a vicious circle. On Russell's view, all objects for which a given condition (or predicate) holds must be at the same level or of the same "type."

Although first introduced in 1903, the theory of types was further developed by Russell in his 1908 article "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types" and in the monumental work he co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead , Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913). Thus the theory admits of two versions, the "simple theory" of 1903 and the "ramified theory" of 1908. Both versions of the theory later came under attack for being both too weak and too strong. For some, the theory was too weak since it failed to resolve all of the known paradoxes. For others, it was too strong since it disallowed many mathematical definitions which, although consistent, violated the vicious circle principle. Russell's response was to introduce the axiom of reducibility, an axiom that lessened the vicious circle principle's scope of application, but which many people claimed was too ad hoc to be justified philosophically.

Of equal significance during this period was Russell's defense of logicism, the theory that mathematics was in some important sense reducible to logic. First defended in his 1901 article "Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics," and then later in greater detail in his Principles of Mathematics and in Principia Mathematica , Russell's logicism consisted of two main theses. The first was that all mathematical truths can be translated into logical truths or, in other words, that the vocabulary of mathematics constitutes a proper subset of that of logic. The second was that all mathematical proofs can be recast as logical proofs or, in other words, that the theorems of mathematics constitute a proper subset of those of logic.

Like Gottlob Frege , Russell's basic idea for defending logicism was that numbers may be identified with classes of classes and that number-theoretic statements may be explained in terms of quantifiers and identity. Thus the number 1 would be identified with the class of all unit classes, the number 2 with the class of all two-membered classes, and so on. Statements such as "There are two books" would be recast as statements such as "There is a book, x , and there is a book, y , and x is not identical to y ." It followed that number-theoretic operations could be explained in terms of set-theoretic operations such as intersection, union, and difference. In Principia Mathematica , Whitehead and Russell were able to provide many detailed derivations of major theorems in set theory, finite and transfinite arithmetic, and elementary measure theory. A fourth volume was planned but never completed.

Russell's most important writings relating to these topics include not only Principles of Mathematics (1903), "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types" (1908), and Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), but also his An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897), and Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919).

In much the same way that Russell used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in the foundations of mathematics, he also used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in philosophy. As one of the founders of analytic philosophy, Russell made significant contributions to a wide variety of areas, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and political theory, as well as to the history of philosophy. Underlying these various projects was not only Russell's use of logical analysis, but also his long-standing aim of discovering whether, and to what extent, knowledge is possible. "There is one great question," he writes in 1911. "Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions." [ 1 ]

More than this, Russell's various contributions were also unified by his views concerning both the centrality of scientific knowledge and the importance of an underlying scientific methodology that is common to both philosophy and science. In the case of philosophy, this methodology expressed itself through Russell's use of logical analysis. In fact, Russell often claimed that he had more confidence in his methodology than in any particular philosophical conclusion.

Russell's conception of philosophy arose in part from his idealist origins. [ 2 ] This is so, even though he believed that his one, true revolution in philosophy came about as a result of his break from idealism. Russell saw that the idealist doctrine of internal relations led to a series of contradictions regarding asymmetrical (and other) relations necessary for mathematics. Thus, in 1898, he abandoned the idealism that he had encountered as a student at Cambridge, together with his Kantian methodology, in favour of a pluralistic realism. As a result, he soon became famous as an advocate of the "new realism" and for his "new philosophy of logic," emphasizing as it did the importance of modern logic for philosophical analysis. The underlying themes of this "revolution," including his belief in pluralism, his emphasis upon anti-psychologism, and the importance of science, remained central to Russell's philosophy for the remainder of his life. [ 3 ]

Russell's methodology consisted of the making and testing of hypotheses through the weighing of evidence (hence Russell's comment that he wished to emphasize the "scientific method" in philosophy [ 4 ] ), together with a rigorous analysis of problematic propositions using the machinery of first-order logic. It was Russell's belief that by using the new logic of his day, philosophers would be able to exhibit the underlying "logical form" of natural language statements. A statement's logical form, in turn, would help philosophers resolve problems of reference associated with the ambiguity and vagueness of natural language. Thus, just as we distinguish three separate sense of "is" (the is of predication, the is of identity, and the is of existence) and exhibit these three senses by using three separate logical notations ( Px , x=y , and ∃ x respectively) we will also discover other ontologically significant distinctions by being aware of a sentence's correct logical form. On Russell's view, the subject matter of philosophy is then distinguished from that of the sciences only by the generality and the a prioricity of philosophical statements, not by the underlying methodology of the discipline. In philosophy, as in mathematics, Russell believed that it was by applying logical machinery and insights that advances would be made.

Russell's most famous example of his "analytic" method concerns denoting phrases such as descriptions and proper names. In his Principles of Mathematics , Russell had adopted the view that every denoting phrase (for example, "Scott," "blue," "the number two," "the golden mountain") denoted, or referred to, an existing entity. By the time his landmark article, "On Denoting," appeared two years later, in 1905, Russell had modified this extreme realism and had instead become convinced that denoting phrases need not possess a theoretical unity.

While logically proper names (words such as "this" or "that" which refer to sensations of which an agent is immediately aware) do have referents associated with them, descriptive phrases (such as "the smallest number less than pi") should be viewed as a collection of quantifiers (such as "all" and "some") and propositional functions (such as " x is a number"). As such, they are not to be viewed as referring terms but, rather, as "incomplete symbols." In other words, they should be viewed as symbols that take on meaning within appropriate contexts, but that are meaningless in isolation.

Thus, in the sentence

(1) The present King of France is bald,

the definite description "The present King of France" plays a role quite different from that of a proper name such as "Scott" in the sentence

(2) Scott is bald.

Letting K abbreviate the predicate "is a present King of France" and B abbreviate the predicate "is bald," Russell assigns sentence (1) the logical form

(1′) There is an x such that (i) Kx , (ii) for any y , if Ky then y=x , and (iii) Bx.

Alternatively, in the notation of the predicate calculus, we have

(1″) ∃ x [( Kx & ∀ y ( Ky → y=x )) & Bx ].

In contrast, by allowing s to abbreviate the name "Scott," Russell assigns sentence (2) the very different logical form

(2′) Bs.

This distinction between various logical forms allows Russell to explain three important puzzles. The first concerns the operation of the Law of Excluded Middle and how this law relates to denoting terms. According to one reading of the Law of Excluded Middle, it must be the case that either "The present King of France is bald" is true or "The present King of France is not bald" is true. But if so, both sentences appear to entail the existence of a present King of France, clearly an undesirable result. Russell's analysis shows how this conclusion can be avoided. By appealing to analysis (1′), it follows that there is a way to deny (1) without being committed to the existence of a present King of France, namely by accepting that "It is not the case that there exists a present King of France who is bald" is true.

The second puzzle concerns the Law of Identity as it operates in (so-called) opaque contexts. Even though "Scott is the author of Waverley " is true, it does not follow that the two referring terms "Scott" and "the author of Waverley " are interchangeable in every situation. Thus although "George IV wanted to know whether Scott was the the author of Waverley " is true, "George IV wanted to know whether Scott was Scott" is, presumably, false. Russell's distinction between the logical forms associated with the use of proper names and definite descriptions shows why this is so.

To see this we once again let s abbreviate the name "Scott." We also let w abbreviate " Waverley " and A abbreviate the two-place predicate "is the author of." It then follows that the sentence

is not at all equivalent to the sentence

(4) ∃ x [ Axw & ∀ y ( Ayw → y=x ) & x=s ].

The third puzzle relates to true negative existential claims, such as the claim "The golden mountain does not exist." Here, once again, by treating definite descriptions as having a logical form distinct from that of proper names, Russell is able to give an account of how a speaker may be committed to the truth of a negative existential without also being committed to the belief that the subject term has reference. That is, the claim that Scott does not exist is false since

(5) ~∃ x ( x=s )

is self-contradictory. (After all, there must exist at least one thing that is identical to s since it is a logical truth that s is identical to itself!) In contrast, the claim that a golden mountain does not exist may be true since, assuming that G abbreviates the predicate "is golden" and M abbreviates the predicate "is a mountain," there is nothing contradictory about

(6) ~∃ x ( Gx & Mx ).

Russell's emphasis upon logical analysis also had consequences for his metaphysics. In response to the traditional problem of the external world which, it is claimed, arises since the external world can be known only by inference, Russell developed his famous 1910 distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description." He then went on, in his 1918 lectures on logical atomism, to argue that the world itself consists of a complex of logical atoms (such as "little patches of colour") and their properties. Together they form the atomic facts which, in turn, are combined to form logically complex objects. What we normally take to be inferred entities (for example, enduring physical objects) are then understood to be "logical constructions" formed from the immediately given entities of sensation, viz., "sensibilia." It is only these latter entities that are known non-inferentially and with certainty.

According to Russell, the philosopher's job is to discover a logically ideal language that will exhibit the true nature of the world in such a way that the speaker will not be misled by the casual surface structure of natural language. Just as atomic facts (the association of universals with an appropriate number of individuals) may be combined into molecular facts in the world itself, such a language would allow for the description of such combinations using logical connectives such as "and" and "or." In addition to atomic and molecular facts, Russell also held that general facts (facts about "all" of something) were needed to complete the picture of the world. Famously, he vacillated on whether negative facts were also required.

Russell's most important writings relating to these topics include not only "On Denoting" (1905), but also his "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" (1910), "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" (1918, 1919), "Logical Atomism" (1924), The Analysis of Mind (1921), and The Analysis of Matter (1927).

Russell's social influence stems from three main sources: his long-standing social activism, his many writings on the social and political issues of his day, and his popularizations of technical writings in philosophy and the natural sciences.

Among Russell's many popularizations are his two best selling works, The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Both of these books, as well as his numerous but less famous books popularizing science, have done much to educate and inform generations of general readers. Naturally enough, Russell saw a link between education, in this broad sense, and social progress. At the same time, Russell is also famous for suggesting that a widespread reliance upon evidence, rather than upon superstition, would have enormous social consequences: "I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration," says Russell, "a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." [ 5 ]

Still, Russell is best known in many circles as a result of his campaigns against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and against western involvement in the Vietnam War during the 1950s and 1960s. However, Russell's social activism stretches back at least as far as 1910, when he published his Anti-Suffragist Anxieties , and to 1916, when he was convicted and fined in connection with anti-war protests during World War I. Following his conviction, he was also dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge. Two years later, he was convicted a second time. The result was six months in prison. Russell also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament (in 1907, 1922, and 1923) and, together with his second wife, founded and operated an experimental school during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Although he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his brother in 1931, Russell's radicalism continued to make him a controversial figure well through middle-age. While teaching in the United States in the late 1930s, he was offered a teaching appointment at City College, New York. The appointment was revoked following a large number of public protests and a 1940 judicial decision which found him morally unfit to teach at the College.

In 1954 he delivered his famous "Man's Peril" broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini H-bomb tests. A year later, together with Albert Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. In 1957 he was a prime organizer of the first Pugwash Conference, which brought together a large number of scientists concerned about the nuclear issue. He became the founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 and was once again imprisoned, this time in connection with anti-nuclear protests in 1961. The media coverage surrounding his conviction only served to enhance Russell's reputation and to further inspire the many idealistic youths who were sympathetic to his anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.

During these controversial years Russell also wrote many of the books that brought him to the attention of popular audiences. These include his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), A Free Man's Worship (1923), On Education (1926), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), Marriage and Morals (1929), The Conquest of Happiness (1930), The Scientific Outlook (1931), and Power: A New Social Analysis (1938).

Upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Russell used his acceptance speech to emphasize, once again, themes related to his social activism.

A Selection of Russell's Articles

A selection of russell's books, major anthologies of russell's writings, the collected papers of bertrand russell.

• (1901) "Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics," International Monthly , 4, 83-101. Repr. as "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians" in Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic , London: Longmans Green, 1918, 74-96.
• (1905) "On Denoting," Mind , 14, 479-493. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Essays in Analysis , London: Allen and Unwin, 1973, 103-119.
• (1908) "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types," American Journal of Mathematics , 30, 222-262. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 59-102, and in van Heijenoort, Jean, From Frege to Gödel , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967, 152-182.
• (1910) "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 11, 108-128. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic , London: Allen and Unwin, 1963, 152-167.
• (1912) "On the Relations of Universals and Particulars," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 12, 1-24. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 105-124.
• (1918, 1919) "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," Monist , 28, 495-527; 29, 32-63, 190-222, 345-380. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 177-281.
• (1924) "Logical Atomism," in Muirhead, J.H., Contemporary British Philosophers , London: Allen and Unwin, 1924, 356-383. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 323-343.
• (1896) German Social Democracy , London: Longmans, Green.
• (1897) An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry , Cambridge: At the University Press.
• (1900) A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz , Cambridge: At the University Press.
• (1903) The Principles of Mathematics , Cambridge: At the University Press.
• (1910, 1912, 1913) (with Alfred North Whitehead) Principia Mathematica , 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Second edition, 1925 (Vol. 1), 1927 (Vols 2, 3). Abridged as Principia Mathematica to *56 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
• (1912) The Problems of Philosophy , London: Williams and Norgate; New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• (1914) Our Knowledge of the External World , Chicago and London: The Open Court Publishing Company.
• (1916) Principles of Social Reconstruction , London: George Allen and Unwin. Repr. as Why Men Fight , New York: The Century Company, 1917.
• (1917) Political Ideals , New York: The Century Company.
• (1919) Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
• (1921) The Analysis of Mind , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
• (1923) A Free Man's Worship , Portland, Maine: Thomas Bird Mosher. Repr. as What Can A Free Man Worship? , Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1927.
• (1926) On Education, Especially in Early Childhood , London: George Allen and Unwin. Repr. as Education and the Good Life , New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926. Abridged as Education of Character , New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
• (1927) The Analysis of Matter , London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: Harcourt, Brace.
• (1927) An Outline of Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin. Repr. as Philosophy , New York: W.W. Norton, 1927.
• (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian , London: Watts, New York: The Truth Seeker Company.
• (1928) Sceptical Essays , New York: Norton.
• (1929) Marriage and Morals , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Horace Liveright.
• (1930) The Conquest of Happiness , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Horace Liveright.
• (1931) The Scientific Outlook , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
• (1938) Power: A New Social Analysis , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
• (1940) An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
• (1945) A History of Western Philosophy , New York: Simon and Schuster; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946.
• (1948) Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1949) Authority and the Individual , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1949) The Philosophy of Logical Atomism , Minneapolis, Minnesota: Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota. Repr. as Russell's Logical Atomism , Oxford: Fontana/Collins, 1972.
• (1954) Human Society in Ethics and Politics , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1959) My Philosophical Development , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1967, 1968, 1969) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell , 3 vols, London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston and Toronto: Little Brown and Company (Vols 1 and 2), New York: Simon and Schuster (Vol. 3).
• (1910) Philosophical Essays , London: Longmans, Green.
• (1918) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays , London and New York: Longmans, Green. Repr. as A Free Man's Worship and Other Essays , London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1976.
• (1928) Sceptical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
• (1935) In Praise of Idleness , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
• (1950) Unpopular Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1956) Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901-1950 , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
• (1956) Portraits From Memory and Other Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1957) Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1961) The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959 , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
• (1969) Dear Bertrand Russell , London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• (1973) Essays in Analysis , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• (1992) The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell , London: Penguin Press.

The Bertrand Russell Editorial Project is currently in the process of publishing Russell's Collected Papers. When complete, these volumes will bring together all of Russell's writings, excluding his correspondence and previously published monographs.

• Vol. 1: Cambridge Essays, 1888-99 , London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983.
• Vol. 2: Philosophical Papers, 1896-99 , London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Vol. 3: Toward the Principles of Mathematics, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Vol. 4: Foundations of Logic, 1903-05 , London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Vol. 6: Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909-13 , London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Vol. 7: Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript , London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1984.
• Vol. 8: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, 1914-19 , London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986.
• Vol. 9: Essays on Language, Mind and Matter, 1919-26 , London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
• Vol. 10: A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927-42 , London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943-68 , London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
• Vol. 12: Contemplation and Action, 1902-14 , London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and] Unwin, 1985.
• Vol. 13: Prophecy and Dissent, 1914-16 , London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
• Vol. 14: Pacifism and Revolution, 1916-18 , London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Vol. 15: Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-1922 , London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Vol. 28: Man's Peril, 1954-56 , London and New York: Routledge, 2003

Planned and Forthcoming

• Vol. 5: Toward Principia Mathematica, 1906-08.
• Vol. 16: Labour and Internationalism, 1922-24.
• Vol. 17: Behaviourism and Education, 1925-28.
• Vol. 18: Science, Sex and Society, 1929-31.
• Vol. 19: Fascism and Other Depression Legacies, 1931-33.
• Vol. 20: Fascism and Other Depression Legacies, 1933-34.
• Vol. 21: How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1934-36.
• Vol. 22: The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed and Other Essays, 1936-39.
• Vol. 23: The Problems of Democracy, 1940-44.
• Vol. 24: Civilization and the Bomb, 1944-47.
• Vol. 25: Civilization and the Bomb, 1948-50.
• Vol. 26: Respectability at Last, 1950-51.
• Vol. 27: Respectability at Last, 1952-53.
• Vol. 29: "Détente" or Destruction, 1955-57.
• Vol. 30: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1957-60.
• Vol. 31: A New Plan for Peace and Other Essays, 1960-64.
• Vol. 32: The Vietnam Campaign, 1965-70.
• Vol. 33: Newly Discovered Papers.
• Vol. 34: Indexes.

Selected Articles

Selected books.

• Broad, C.D. (1973) "Bertrand Russell, as Philosopher," Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society , 5, 328-341.
• Carnap, Rudolf (1931) "The Logicist Foundations of Mathematics," Erkenntnis , 2, 91-105. Repr. in Benacerraf, Paul, and Hilary Putnam (eds), Philosophy of Mathematics , 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 41-52; in Klemke, E.D. (ed.), Essays on Bertrand Russell , Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970, 341-354; and in Pears, David F. (ed.), Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays , Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, 175-191.
• Church, Alonzo (1976) "Comparison of Russell's Resolution of the Semantical Antinomies with That of Tarski," Journal of Symbolic Logic , 41, 747-760. Repr. in A.D. Irvine, Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments , vol. 2, New York and London: Routledge, 1999, 96-112.
• Church, Alonzo (1974) "Russellian Simple Type Theory," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , 47, 21-33.
• Gandy, R.O. (1973) "Bertrand Russell, as Mathematician," Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society , 5, 342-348.
• Gödel, Kurt (1944) "Russell's Mathematical Logic," in Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell , 3rd ed., New York: Tudor, 1951, 123-153. Repr. in Benacerraf, Paul, and Hilary Putnam (eds), Philosophy of Mathematics , 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 447-469; and in Pears, David F. (ed.) (1972) Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays , Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 192-226.
• Hylton, Peter W. (1990) "Logic in Russell's Logicism," in Bell, David, and Neil Cooper (eds), The Analytic Tradition: Philosophical Quarterly Monographs , Vol. 1, Cambridge: Blackwell, 137-172.
• Irvine, A.D. (1989) "Epistemic Logicism and Russell's Regressive Method," Philosophical Studies , 55, 303-327.
• Irvine, A.D. (1996) "Bertrand Russell and Academic Freedom," Russell , n.s.16, 5-36.
• Kaplan, David (1970) "What is Russell's Theory of Descriptions?," in Yourgrau, Wolfgang, and Allen D. Breck, (eds), Physics, Logic, and History , New York: Plenum, 277-288. Repr. in Pears, David F. (ed.), Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays , Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, 227-244.
• Lycan, William (1981) "Logical Atomism and Ontological Atoms," Synthese , 46, 207-229.
• Monro, D.H. (1960) "Russell's Moral Theories," Philosophy , 35, 30-50. Repr. in Pears, David F. (ed.), Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays , Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, 325-355.
• Putnam, Hilary (1967) "The Thesis that Mathematics is Logic," in Schoenman, Ralph (ed.), Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the Century , London: Allen and Unwin, 273-303. Repr. in Putnam, Hilary, Mathematics, Matter and Method , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 12-42.
• Quine, W.V. (1938) "On the Theory of Types," Journal of Symbolic Logic , 3, 125-139.
• Ramsey, F.P. (1926) "Mathematical Logic," Mathematical Gazette , 13, 185-194. Repr. in Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, The Foundations of Mathematics , London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931, 62-81; in Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, Foundations , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, 213-232; and in Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, Philosophical Papers , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 225-244.]
• Schultz, Bart (1992) "Bertrand Russell in Ethics and Politics," Ethics , 102, 594-634.
• Strawson, Peter F. (1950) "On Referring," Mind , 59, 320-344. Repr. in Flew, Anthony (ed.), Essays in Conceptual Analysis , London: Macmillan, 1960, 21-52, and in Klemke, E.D. (ed.), Essays on Bertrand Russell , Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970, 147-172.
• Urquhart, Alasdair (1988) "Russell's Zig-Zag Path to the Ramified Theory of Types," Russell , 8, 82-91.
• Weitz, Morris (1944) "Analysis and the Unity of Russell's Philosophy," in Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell , 3rd ed., New York: Tudor, 1951, 55-121.
• Blackwell, Kenneth (1985) The Spinozistic Ethics of Bertrand Russell , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Blackwell, Kenneth, and Harry Ruja (1994) A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell , 3 vols, London: Routledge.
• Chomsky, Noam (1971) Problems of Knowledge and Freedom: The Russell Lectures , New York: Vintage.
• Clark, Ronald William (1975) The Life of Bertrand Russell , London: J. Cape.
• Clark, Ronald William (1981) Bertrand Russell and His World , London: Thames and Hudson.
• Copi, Irving (1971) The Theory of Logical Types , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Dewey, John, and Horace M. Kallen (eds) (1941) The Bertrand Russell Case , New York: Viking.
• Eames, Elizabeth R. (1969) Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Eames, Elizabeth R. (1989) Bertrand Russell's Dialogue with his Contemporaries , Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Feinberg, Barry, and Ronald Kasrils (eds) (1969) Dear Bertrand Russell , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Feinberg, Barry, and Ronald Kasrils (1973, 1983) Bertrand Russell's America , 2 vols, London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Grattan-Guinness, I. (1977) Dear Russell, Dear Jourdain: A Commentary on Russell's Logic, Based on His Correspondence with Philip Jourdain , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Griffin, Nicholas (1991) Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship , Oxford: Clarendon.
• Hager, Paul J. (1994) Continuity and Change in the Development of Russell's Philosophy , Dordrecht: Nijhoff.
• Hardy, Godfrey H. (1942) Bertrand Russell and Trinity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
• Hylton, Peter W. (1990) Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon.
• Irvine, A.D. (ed.) (1999) Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments , 4 vols, London: Routledge.
• Irvine, A.D., and G.A. Wedeking (eds) (1993) Russell and Analytic Philosophy , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Jager, Ronald (1972) The Development of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Klemke, E.D. (ed.) (1970) Essays on Bertrand Russell , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Landini, Gregory (1998) Russell's Hidden Substitutional Theory , New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Linsky, Bernard (1999) Russell's Metaphysical Logic , Stanford: CSLI Publications.
• Monk, Ray (1996) Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude , London: Jonathan Cape.
• Monk, Ray (2000) Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness , London: Jonathan Cape.
• Monk, Ray, and Anthony Palmer (eds) (1996) Bertrand Russell and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy , Bristol: Thoemmes Press.
• Moorehead, Caroline (1992) Bertrand Russell , New York: Viking.
• Nakhnikian, George (ed.) (1974) Bertrand Russell's Philosophy , London: Duckworth.
• Park, Joe (1963) Bertrand Russell on Education , Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
• Patterson, Wayne (1993) Bertrand Russell's Philosophy of Logical Atomism , New York: Lang.
• Pears, David F. (1967) Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy , London: Collins.
• Pears, David F. (ed.) (1972) Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays , New York: Doubleday.
• Quine, W.V (1960) Word and Object , Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Quine, W.V (1966) Selected Logic Papers , New York: Random House.
• Quine, W.V (1966) Ways of Paradox , New York: Random House.
• Ramsey, Frank P. (1960) The Foundations of Mathematics , Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams and Co.
• Roberts, George W. (ed.) (1979) Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Rodriguez-Consuegra, Francisco A. (1991) The Mathematical Philosophy of Bertrand Russell: Origins and Development , Basel: Birkhauser Verlag.
• Ryan, Alan (1988) Bertrand Russell: A Political Life , New York: Hill and Wang.
• Savage, C. Wade, and C. Anthony Anderson (eds) (1989) Rereading Russell: Essays on Bertrand Russell's Metaphysics and Epistemology , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.) (1944) The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell , Chicago: Northwestern University; 3rd ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
• Schoenman, Ralph (ed.) (1967) Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the Century , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Slater, John G. (1994) Bertrand Russell , Bristol: Thoemmes.
• Tait, Katharine (1975) My Father Bertrand Russell , New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Vellacott, Jo (1980) Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War , Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1921) Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. Trans. as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1956) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Wood, Alan (1957) Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Sceptic , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Bertrand Russell Archives
• Bertrand Russell Gallery
• Bertrand Russell Research Centre
• Bertrand Russell Society
• Bertrand Russell's Nobel Prize in Literature 1950
• Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies
• University of St Andrew's MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive: Bertrand Russell
• Writings by Bertrand Russell

descriptions | Frege, Gottlob | Gödel, Kurt | knowledge: by acquaintance vs. description | logic: classical | logical atomism: Russell's | logical constructions | -->logicism --> | mathematics, philosophy of | Moore, George Edward | Principia Mathematica | -->propositional function --> | Russell's paradox | type theory | Whitehead, Alfred North | Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Philosophy › The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell

The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 20, 2019 • ( 0 )

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell (1872–1970 ce), was born into an aristocratic English family with considerable political tradition and influence. Both his parents died before he turned four; he was brought up by his paternal grandmother, who seems to have been a rigid and domineering character with a powerful sense of duty. He went up to Trinity College Cambridge in 1890 and studied mathematics for three years before taking up philosophy. The outbreak of the First World War aroused Russell’s vehement opposition; his anti-war work led to his dismissal from his position as lecturer at Trinity College in 1916, and to his being jailed in 1918. He was reappointed by Trinity in 1920 but soon resigned. Thereafter he was financially dependent upon sales of books and essays; energy which might have gone into academic philosophy thus went into popular writings. After the Second World War he received the Order of Merit (1949) and the Nobel Prize for literature (1950); he nevertheless devoted much of his time to political activism, in opposition to the establishment. He was motivated by an understanding of the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and, later, by his opposition to the involvement of the United States in Vietnam; in his nineties he again became well known as an anti-war activist.

Russell wrote voluminously, and with astonishing facility, over an immense range of both genres and subjects. It is, however, his philosophical work on logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and related issues which is of lasting value. His writings on these topics from the first two decades of the twentieth century played a large role in setting the tone and framing the questions for what came to be known as “analytic philosophy”; the thought of Wittgenstein and of Carnap, and thus also of many others, is unimaginable without this work of Russell’s. This chapter thus concentrates on that period. His work of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, while perhaps less enduring, made important contributions to debates within analytic philosophy, especially to epistemology and the philosophy of science.

In late nineteenth-century Britain the prevailing philosophical tone was set by attempts to assimilate the work of Kant and, especially, Hegel. These attempts resulted in a variety of views generally grouped under the heading “British idealism”; F. H. Bradley was a leading figure in this movement. A fundamental idea lying behind various versions of idealism is that our knowledge is mediated by conceptual structures and that the (knowable) world is thus in some sense mind-dependent. Another conclusion adopted by many, though not all, idealists was a strong form of holism : that the world is not made of up of independent objects standing in relation to one another but is, instead, a single system whose parts can be isolated only at the price of some distortion. According to this view, our knowledge is never of the whole, so nothing we know is fully true – we know merely partial truths. At first Russell accepted the broad outlines of the idealist position. He was, however, far more interested in science, and especially mathematics, than most of those influenced by idealism. He had immensely ambitious plans for a philosophical treatment of all scientific knowledge from a Hegelian point of view; his first philosophical book, An Assay on the Foundations of Geometry , was intended to be a part of this project.

Two major shifts in Russell’s thought occurred around the turn of the century, one metaphysical and one logical. In metaphysics, he and his younger contemporary at Trinity, G. E. Moore, broke with idealism around 1898, and began to articulate an extreme version of realism. In opposition to idealism, they asserted that the world is made up of objects, each of which is fully real and is completely independent both of our minds and of all other objects – objects are not affected by their relations to other objects, but are merely externally related to one another. (The view is thus a form of atomism ; equally it advocates the philosophical method of analysis , which seeks to understand complex wholes in terms of their simple parts, rather than vice versa.) And they postulated that we have a direct cognitive relation, which Russell later called acquaintance , to various objects – not only those perceivable by the senses, such as tables and trees, but also, and especially, abstract objects, such as goodness and numbers. Philosophy, as they conceived it, is wholly independent of psychology, and has no particular concern with the human mind.

In logic, Russell encountered Peano at a conference in Paris in August 1900, and set out to understand his logical work. In an astonishingly short time he had not only mastered it but extended it to handle what Peirce and Schröder had called the logic of relations . The result was a system of logic dealing not only with inferences involving one-place predicates (such as “. . . is mortal”) but also with those involving relations, i.e. predicates of two or more places (such as “. . . loves . . .”, or “. . . is between . . . and . . .”). Russell’s extension of Peano lacked the clarity and simplicity of the logic which Frege had (unbeknownst to Russell) produced in 1879; one way or another, however, this part of Russell’s logic had the power of what is today called first-order quantification theory, or predicate logic (this is logic which uses variables to generalize about objects, but not about properties of objects). Russell made much of the fact that the new logic deals with relations, which many idealists had not accepted as fully real.

This new logic is crucial for an account of mathematics. To take a simple but important example, the infinitude of natural numbers follows from the following facts: that for every number there is a larger number; that there is at least one number; that no number is larger than itself; and that “larger than” is a transitive relation (i.e. for any numbers, a, b, c, if a is larger than b, and b is larger than c , then a is larger than c ). The inference from these premises to the conclusion that there are infinitely many natural numbers is obviously correct; the achievement of Frege and of Russell was to treat it within a rigourous system of logic, thereby dispelling some of the mystery surrounding the infinite.

A treatment of the sorts of inferences typical of mathematics does not by itself afford a complete account of that subject. Kant had put forward a view of mathematics as dependent on the forms of our intuition and had thus made it, at least by Russell’s lights, mind-dependent. This was precisely the sort of view that Russell wished to combat, and he did so by arguing that the truths of mathematics can all be stated in logical terms and, when so stated, can all be proved by logical means (here too Russell was anticipated by Frege, but his work seems to have been independent of Frege’s). This view, known as logicism , requires a logic that includes a theory of classes, or some other theory more or less equivalent to what we now call set theory.

In the course of developing a theory of classes, Russell came across what has become known as Russell’s paradox . It is a natural assumption that there is a class corresponding to each one place predicate (corresponding to the predicate “. . . is mortal” is the class whose members are exactly those things which are mortal, and so on). Since we have the notion of being a member of a class, we also have the predicate “is not a member of itself”; hence, given the natural assumption, we have the class of things which are not members of themselves. But is this class a member of itself? That is, is the class of things which are not members of themselves a member of itself? Either answer leads to its opposite, resulting in paradox: if it is a member of itself then it is a self-member, and so not a member of the class of non-self-members, i.e. not a member of itself after all; but if it is not a member of itself then it is a non-self-member and so is a member of itself. To avoid this paradox, and others which he saw as related, Russell developed the t heory of types . According to this theory, entities are of fundamentally different types; what can be said of an entity of one type results in nonsense if we attempt to say it of an entity of another type. In particular, an entity can be a member only of classes immediately higher in type than it is. Sentences which appear to assert or deny self-membership are thus nonsensical. This theory was tentatively put forward in an appendix to The Principles of Mathematics, and was developed in “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types.” It reached its full form in Whitehead and Russell’s monumental Principia Mathematica , which made out the technical case for logicism in great detail. This work had a profound influence on the progress of mathematical logic, in the hands of Gödel and others; one application of these advances led in turn to the development of computers, and has thus had incalculable practical influence.

Generality, standardly conveyed by variables, is essential to logic and to mathematics. Russell initially hoped to explain generality , and the use of variables, by a theory of what he called denoting concepts . According to that theory, a sentence containing a description, i.e. a phrase formed with one of the words “all”, “any”, “some”, “a”, and “the”, expresses a proposition containing a concept which denotes an object or objects not contained in the proposition. Thus the sentence “All people are mortal” expresses a proposition which contains a denoting concept, all people, which in turn denotes all people; the proposition does not itself contain all people. This theory is supposed to explain how the sentence is about all people: it is about them because it contains a denoting concept which denotes them. (The theory is also supposed to explain how a definite description, such as “the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo,” can be part of a sentence which makes sense, even though there is no object which uniquely answers to the description. For the sentence to make sense we need only be sure that there is a proposition which it expresses; the proposition contains the denoting concept, not the supposed man, so its status is unaffected if there is in fact no such man.) Russell’s attempt to explain generality in terms of denoting concepts, however, failed, as he himself came to see. The theory of denoting concepts, moreover, proved to be exceedingly complex, and led to formidable difficulties.

Russell thus had every reason to abandon the theory of denoting concepts and to take the use of variables as fundamental, as Frege did. The one obstacle to his doing so was the case of definite descriptions, descriptions formed with “the” which seem to refer to exactly one object. (Frege had taken such phrases as logically primitive.) At some point in 1905 Russell saw how to analyze definite descriptions; this enabled him to discard the theory of denoting concepts completely. The result was his celebrated “theory of descriptions,” which analyzes sentences of the form “The F is G” (e.g. “The King of France is bald”) as saying: there is an object x which is F, and for every object y, if y is F then y = x , and x is G. More briefly: there is one and only one object which is F, and it is G.

The theory of descriptions was immensely important as an example of logical analysis; F. P. Ramsey, in a description endorsed by Moore, called it a “paradigm of philosophy.” For Russell it also played an important, though indirect, role in his development of the theory of types. He saw it as a particular case of a more general theory of incomplete symbols. Phrases such as “the King of France,” which appear to get their meaning by their relation to some non-linguistic entity (whether a monarch or a denoting concept), may, according to this theory, function in quite a different way. Such expressions, according to Russell, “have no meaning in isolation.” They are “incomplete symbols”: we can explain each sentence in which they occur, but not the phrase itself in isolation. Russell applied this idea to classes, and analyzed expressions which appeared to refer to classes in terms of what he called propositional functions (very roughly, the non-linguistic correlates of expressions containing free variables, such as “ x is a prime number”). This helped because he was more willing to suppose that propositional functions are stratified into types than that classes are. According to his new view, we need not assume that there are classes (hence he called it the no-classes theory ). Symbols for classes make sense in context, because they are defined, in each context, in terms of propositional functions.

Because of Russell’s concern to block a whole range of paradoxes, and because of the intricacies of his view of propositional functions, his theory of types is far more complex than would be needed simply to block Russell’s paradox. Ramsey showed that a simpler version – now known as simple type theory – would suffice for that task (Ramsey, 1925); since that time, Russell’s full version has been known as ramified type theory . Proving the truths of mathematics from either version of type theory requires the additional assumption, which Russell himself thought could not be justified by logic, that there are infinitely many objects. (Without this assumption we cannot prove that there are infi- nitely many numbers.) The ramified version also necessitates an axiom – the axiom of reducibility – which is hard to justify except on ad hoc grounds. These two points go a long way toward undermining the force of Russell’s logicism, even for a sympathetic commentator.

Russell’s increasing exploitation of the theory of incomplete symbols marked a partial retreat from his earlier extreme realism. He now accepts that there are many phrases which appear to refer to objects but do not in fact do so. An important example is the so-called multiple relation theory of judgment. According to this view, a proposition is not a genuine entity with which the judging mind is acquainted. There are no propositions in that sense; instead judgment involves acquaintance with a number of entities, and it is an act of the mind which unites them into a judgment. (Russell first considered this view in 1906, and had defi- nitely adopted it by 1909.) An advantage of this theory is that it allows truth to be defined in terms of the existence of appropriate facts. (On his earlier view, truth was an indefinable notion.)

After the completion of Principia Mathematica , Russell turned his attention away from logic and mathematics and toward issues raised by our empirical and scientific knowledge. He continued to hold that all knowledge comes via acquaintance, but realized that it is not plausible to think that we are acquainted with the ordinary objects we appear to know. The objects of acquaintance in empirical knowledge, he came to think, must rather be what he called sense-data – a certain color which I perceive, for example, or a sound which I hear. For him these were not mental objects but objective entities, directly given to the mind in sense-perception. How, then, do we get from knowledge of sense-data to knowledge of tables and trees, much less electrons and distant stars? Russell’s attempt to answer this question exploited the same techniques used in his logicism: talk of ordinary objects was to be analyzed and defined in terms of sense-data and classes of sense-data, and classes of classes of sense-data, and so on. (Russell always attributed this technique of logical construction to Whitehead). This idea is most clearly set out in Our Knowledge of the External World and in some of the essays in Mysticism and Logic; for the most obvious signs of its influence, see Carnap (1928).

Russell began this work on empirical knowledge without having fully articulated the implications of his multiple relation theory of propositions, and its relation to his logic and to his underlying metaphysical views. His work on these topics (now published as volume 7 of Collected Papers ) was brought to a halt by criticisms from Wittgenstein. Russell never resolved these fundamental problems; his lectures “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” contain an excellent summary of his views, but leave many problems admittedly unresolved and suggest that their solution may require a more psychological view of meaning. ( Wittgenstein ’s Tractatus may be thought of as offering a different kind of solution to these problems – but the solution is a drastic one, involving the abandonment of logicism, and a complete rethinking of the nature of logic.)

Russell’s later work in technical philosophy, though perhaps less fundamental than the work we have been discussing, was still of great significance. In 1919 he adopted a view known as “neutral monism,” advocated by Mach and by William james. According to this view there are not two kinds of things in the world, the mental and the physical; instead there is one kind of stuff, in itself neither mental nor physical (hence “neutral”). Some arrangements of it are what we call mental, others what we call physical. Thus the mind is not an entity distinct from the rest of the world but is made up of the same fundamental constituents as everything else. Russell’s Analysis of Mind shows the influence both of that view and of behaviorism; it articulates a psychological approach to issues of belief and meaning. More generally, the book shows a shift from a logical and metaphysical framework towards a naturalistic framework – a shift which might be thought to reach full flower with the work of Quine. (Much of the discussion of the mental in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can usefully be seen as directed against views that Russell puts forward in this work.) Russell’s Analysis of Matter is an attempt to come to terms with logical and epistemological issues which he took to be raised by the new physics, especially the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics; an important feature of this work is the idea that we know the structural features of the world, but not its intrinsic nature. In his late sixties he gave the William James lectures at Harvard, published as An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, an investigation of issues in the philosophy of language. His last significant philosophical work was Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, which returned to issues of knowledge and its justification. This work is less concerned than Russell’s earlier views of knowledge to show that human knowledge is constructed on a foundation of certainty; all our knowledge is, instead, held to be fallible. Empirical knowledge beyond particular facts depends upon postulates, which cannot themselves be derived from experience. (An example: suppose that in all cases where we have observed an Atype event and a B-type event together, we have reason to think that the two are causally related; then, when we observe an event of one of those types alone, it is probable that an event of the other type also took place, unobserved.) The postulates are justified, if at all, by the overall coherence which they bring to our total system of beliefs.

Bibliography

Writings An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897). The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). “On Denoting”, Mind, NS, XIV (1905), 530–8. [Very widely reprinted.] “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types”, American Journal of Mathematics, 30 (1908), 222–62. Principia Mathematica, with A. N. Whitehead, three volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–13). Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1914). Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (New York: Longmans Green & Co., 1918). “Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” Monist, 28 (1918), 495–527; 29 (1919), 32–63, 190–222, 345–80. The Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921). The Analysis of Matter (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1927). An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940). Human Knowledge Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948). Logic and Knowledge, ed. R. C. Marsh (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956) [Contains Russell (1905, 1908, 1918–19), among other essays] . Collected Papers (1983–). [Produced by the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project, based at McMaster University. The project aims to publish all of Russell’s writings of less than book length. Ten volumes have been published to date, with various editors; some by George Allen & Unwin, some by Routledge, some by Unwin Hyman.] 4

Further reading Carnap, R.: Die Logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin-Schlactensee: Weltkreis-Verlag, 1928); trans. R. A. George, The Logical Structure of the World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). Griffin, N.: Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991). Hylton, P. W.: Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Pears, D. F.: Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1967). Ramsey, F. P.: “The Foundations of Mathematics.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, series 2, 25 (5) (1925), 338–84; reprinted in F. P. Ramsey, the Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, ed. R. B. Braithwaite (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1931) and elsewhere. Wittgenstein, L.: Logische-philosophische Abhandlung (in Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 1921); trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).

Share this:

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: An Assay on the Foundations of Geometry , An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth , Bertrand Russell , Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits , Literary Criticism , Literary Criticism of Bertrand Russell , Literary Theory , Literary Theory of Bertrand Russell , Mysticism and Logic; , Our Knowledge of the External World , ramified type theory , Russell , Russell’s Analysis of Mind , Russell’s paradox , The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell , The Philosophy of Russell , Wittgenstein

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Project Gutenberg
• 73,222 free eBooks
• 20 by Bertrand Russell

Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Philosophical essays

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

11,426 Views

35 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

For users with print-disabilities

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by Alyson-Wieczorek on August 15, 2008

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Faculty of Humanities

The bertrand russell research centre, the collected papers of bertrand russell.

On a bookshelf in the Bertrand Russell Research Centre is a set of blue, hard-bound volumes, all well-thumbed. These volumes, twenty-two and counting, reflect many years of researchers’ time and sweat, and constitute a sizeable portion of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell , a critical edition of all Russell’s shorter writings, published and unpublished, projected to be completed in 35 volumes.

Expandable List

Overview and history.

Russell’s major, book-length works, both inside and outside the sphere of technical philosophy, remain in print and are an essential introduction to the man and his thought. But many of his more important or intriguing ideas were published as essays or journalism, or remained unpublished in manuscript form. There is a voluminous body of material in these categories in the Bertrand Russell Archives, which contain Russell’s complete papers and are one of McMaster University’s greatest treasures. Since Russell was such a provocative thinker on so broad a range of philosophical, social and political questions, and a writer who excelled with the essay form, it is vital that these shorter writings be made accessible in a single, definitive edition that elaborates on his ideas and concerns and illustrates the paths by which he arrived at his conclusions. The Bertrand Russell Editorial Project at McMaster University was conceived in order to meet this need.

The project began in 1969 under the auspices of the University librarian, William Ready. After much planning, but also realizing that a larger editorial team was needed, the original editors, Dr. Kenneth Blackwell and Dr. John G. Slater, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, invited Dr. Nicholas Griffin, a McMaster logician and professor of philosophy, to join them.

The scope of Russell’s work still required a wider range of academics to edit his humanistic writings. In 1978, ten years after McMaster acquired the Russell Archives, Professor Alwyn Berland, Dean of Humanities and Chair of the project’s Board of Management, expanded the team to begin publication of the papers. The additional editors were Dr. Richard Rempel of History and Dr. Andrew Brink of English.

The collection would actually comprise two series. Roughly one-third of the volumes would include Russell’s earlier, so-called technical writings on philosophy, logic, science and mathematics. The others would reflect Russell’s interests in a large variety of other topics—political and social theory, war and peace, religion, education, women’s rights and morality. Included among the planned twenty-nine volumes would be Blackwell’s own bibliography of all of Russell’s published texts, on which he had been engaged with Harry Ruja since 1964.

Before the Editorial Project was set up in 1980, about 90 per cent of Russell’s 2,500 or so shorter public writings had never before been collected. About half the volumes in the  Collected Papers  have been published thus far. The edition has received widespread critical acclaim, proven invaluable as a research tool and stimulated Russell scholarship in a host of areas.

Sample Texts from the Collected Papers

The Table of Contents for certain volumes of the  Collected Papers  underneath (volumes 10, 11, 15, 21, 28, and 29) contain links to a selection of Russell texts. The editorial apparatus—headnote, annotation, textual notes and bibliographical index entries—has also been uploaded for each of the chosen papers.

Embedded in the texts are invisible links to the annotations and textual notes. As you scroll through the PDF, watch for your cursor turning into a pointing finger then click your mouse. You can link back to the text by clicking the page of the page and line number supplied adjacent to each annotation or textual note. Alternatively, the annotations and textual notes can be accessed simply by scrolling down to the bottom of the web page. Bibliographical index entries have been placed in pop-up boxes linked to the year (highlighted in yellow) of the author–date reference. Some browsers will display the bibliographical information by moving the mouse over the link; others will require you to open the pop-up box with a mouse click.

The selected material includes some comparatively obscure texts as well as more familiar works—chosen because of the particular editorial challenges they posed.

From  CPBR 10: A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927–42 3: My Religious Reminiscences  [1938] 17:  Probability and Fact  [1930] 58:  Freedom and Government  [1940]

From  CPBR  11:  Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68 15:  The Nature and Origin of Scientific Method  [1948] 59:  The Duty of a Philosopher in This Age  [1964] 69:  Is There a God?  [1952]

From  CPBR  15:  Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919–22 6:  Democracy and Direct Action  [1919] 41:  The Prospects of Bolshevik Russia  [1921] 50:  China’s Road to Freedom  [1921]

From  CPBR  21:  How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1935–38 1:  On Isolationism  [1935] 48:  Auto-Obituary  [1936] 99:  The Crisis in Foreign Policy  [1938]

From  CPBR  24,  Civilization and the Bomb, 1944–47 58:  The Atomic Bomb [1945]

From  CPBR  28,  Man’s Peril, 1954–55 16: Man’s Peril  [1954] 19:  Trotsky in the Ascendant  [1954]

From  CPBR  29:  Détente or Destruction, 1955–57 7:  Prospects of Disarmament  [1956] 34:  Foreword to  Freedom Is as Freedom Does  [1956] 63:  Britain and the H-bomb  [1957]

Additionally, the Russell Editorial Project is offering an electronic version of an edition-in-progress of Russell’s first anti-nuclear writing. The electronic version has the full range of hypertext capabilities woven into the traditional  Collected Papers  structure of headnote, chronology, text, annotation, textual notes, bibliographical index, and illustrations.

Russell’s paper is called “The Atomic Bomb” (published as “The Bomb and Civilization”) and was written in 1945. The editor of this paper, which is scheduled to be in Volume 24, is  Kenneth Blackwell . Let him know of any errors, and if you find the hypertext apparatus at all infelicitous. A conventional view of the headnote, paper and apparatus as they will be printed in the typeface of the edition is available in  pdf format . This view is searchable, saveable, and printable.

The People Involved in the Collected Papers

Current members.

Kenneth Blackwell:  Dr. Blackwell was appointed Russell Archivist in the McMaster Library in 1968. He was the Project’s Textual Editor until 1983. He co-edited Volumes 1 and 7 and has undertaken Volumes 24 and 25. (An edition-in-progress of Russell’s first anti-nuclear writing has been made available for comment.) With Harry Ruja he is responsible for the three-volume Bibliography of Bertrand Russell. Blackwell’s publications include  The Spinozistic Ethics of Bertrand Russell , and he is editor of  Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies . He retired as Russell Archivist in 1996, being granted the title of Honorary Russell Archivist. He continues to edit  Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies , and to work on the BRACERS database, a catalogue of the correspondence in the Russell Archives.

David Blitz of Central Connecticut State University has worked on the Russell Audio-Visual Project which has to date digitized numerous Russell recordings, including, among the more notable, his 1958 debate on disarmament with Edward Teller. Prof. Blitz is a member of the Department of Philosophy at CCSU, which he has served as chair. He has also acted as coordinator of the recently established CCSU Peace Studies Program.

Andrew Bone:  Dr. Bone, who joined the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project in January 1997, is a specialist in Modern British History who completed a Ph.D. thesis on the operation of the Defence of the Realm Acts and Regulations in First World War Britain. He worked as an assistant editor on Volume 15 and has edited (most recently) Volume 26,  Cold War Fears and Hopes,  1950–52, plus Volume 28,  Man’s Peril, 1954–55 , Volume 29,  Détente or Destruction, 1955–57 , as well as co-editing (with Michael Stevenson) Volume 21,  How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1935–38 . In 2001 he was appointed Senior Research Associate, and he took over the general editorship of the edition after Nicholas Griffin’s retirement as director in the summer of 2018. He continues to assist several other editors with their volumes, as well as working (with Griffin and Stevenson) on Volume 16,  Labour and Internationalism,  1922–25, and on another  “ Cold War ”  volume, 27, C ulture and the Cold War, 1952–53 .

William (Bill) Bruneau  is editing Russell’s educational writings for Volumes 17–20 of the  Collected Papers . His education as an historian and philosopher (Universities of Saskatchewan and Toronto), occasional studies at the Universities of Paris and Oxford, and a general sympathy for Russell’s social objectives, all led Bruneau to become actively interested in the life and work of Bertrand Russell from the early 1960s. A specialist in university history in the industrial and post-industrial periods, in Europe and Canada, and also in general educational policy,  Bruneau taught in the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, from 1971 until his retirement, and is now a professor emeritus. His most recent books are Counting Out the Scholars: The Case Against Performance Indicators in Universities and Colleges  (with D.C. Savage, 2001) and  Jean Coulthard: A Life in Music  (with D.G. Duke, 2005).

Arlene Duncan  manages the office of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre and is a skilled typesetter who has keyed in most of the published volumes, the three-volume bibliography and all volumes in progress. She is also closely involved with the typesetting of  Russell:  the Journal of Bertrand Russell  Studies, and with the transcription content in BRACERS that will become part of the  Collected Letters.

Nicholas Griffin:  In July 2000 Dr. Griffin assumed the dual roles of director of the new Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University and general editor of the  Collected Papers,  positions he held until his retirement from the department of philosophy (where he also held a Canada Research Chair) in the summer of 2018. Now a professor emeritus and the McMaster University Library Scholar in Residence, he has published widely on Russell—as an editor of Volumes 1 and 2 of the  Collected Papers  and of a two-volume selection of his letters, and as author of a number of studies, including  Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship . He completed work on the  Cambridge Companion to Russell  in 2003; in addition to his Russell scholarship, Dr. Griffin is interested in the philosophy of logic and theory of knowledge. He is presently working on Volume 16 of the  Collected Papers  with Bone and Stevenson.

Stephen Heathorn is professor and former chair of the Department of History at McMaster. He is editing Volume 18 of the Collected Papers , and is also working on a monograph on Russell’s Marriage and Morals . He has published four books and some 30 peer-reviewed articles on various aspects of modern British History, and also co-edited Taking Liberties: A History of Human Rights in Canada. His most recent, co-authored, book is a revised edition of Britain since 1688: A Nation in the World.

Carl Spadoni  is the former Director of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University and the editor of Volume 30,  The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1957–59 . His association with Russell studies began in 1972–73 when he completed an M.A. in philosophy at McMaster. After completing his doctorate and MLS, he worked as the Assistant Russell Archivist under the guidance of his mentor, Kenneth Blackwell. Spadoni is the author and editor of 10 books and 100 other publications.

Michael D. Stevenson  is an associate professor of history the Orillia campus of Lakehead University. A full-time member of the Centre’s staff from 2002 to 2006, Stevenson assisted the editors of several volumes in progress and co-edited (with Andrew Bone) Volume 21,  How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1935–38.  He remains closely involved with the  Collected Papers  project and is presently working on Volumes 16 and 17. He has also served as editor of the Bertrand Russell Society’s twice-yearly  Bulletin.  Beyond the field of Russel studies he has edited two volumes of diplomatic correspondence in the  Documents on Canadian External Relations  series (covering the years 1957 and 1958); his many other publications in Canadian history include the scholarly monograph,  Canada’s Greatest Wartime Muddle: National Selective and the Mobilization of Human Resources during World War II  (2001).

Sheila Turcon,  an M.A. in modern British history, wrote several of the chronologies, three general indexes and collaborated with Blackwell on the Bibliography. She has also worked with him on Volume 24. Turcon is the author of  Bertrand Russell’s Odyssey: An Exhibition in Celebration of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre . For many years she worked part-time in Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University. She has edited Russell’s correspondence with Lady Constance Malleson, for the  Collected Letters , and she is working on an ongoing project about  Russell’s homes .

Other Members

James Chartrand  worked intermittently at the Centre from 2002, when he was appointed Project Manager and Head Programmer for the Bertrand Russell  Collected Letters  project, until 2014. He designed a software platform for “linking” the thousands of digitized images of Russell letters to their corresponding entry in BRACERS.

Louis Greenspan: Dr. Greenspan, who sadly passed away in May 2018, was an emeritus professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster and director of the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project from 1994 to 1997 and its managing editor from 1986 to 1994. He also chaired the Bertrand Russell Archives Copyright Permissions Committee. Greenspan joined McMaster in 1967. In addition to his work on the Collected Papers  (he was a co-editor of Volume 14), Russell was the subject of Greenspan’s Ph.D.; he has also conducted research on modern liberal thought and modern Jewish thought.

Gregory H. Moore:  Dr. Moore (d. 2021) was an historian of mathematics, especially of the history of mathematical logic and set theory. He was an emeritus professor of mathematics at McMaster. He has published a well-received book on the history of the Axiom of Choice. In that book, as in many of Moore’s publications, Russell’s work on logic plays a substantial role. Volumes 3 and 5 of the  Collected Papers  were edited by Moore.

Richard Rempel:  A professor emeritus of history at McMaster, Dr. Rempel was the director of the Editorial Project from 1997 until 2000 when work on the  Collected Papers  was subsumed under the new Bertrand Russell Research Centre. He edited or co-edited five volumes of the  Collected Papers.  He was also the Editorial Project’s coordinator in 1980 when McMaster was awarded $1.8 million (from SSHRC) over five years to publish  The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell . He was a member of the editorial board of the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project from 1980 to 1983. In 1986 he was awarded a SSHRC grant to complete a volume in  The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell . In the spring of 1994, Rempel was awarded a further SSHRC grant of $198,000 over three years to continue work on the non-technical volumes.

John Slater: Dr. Slater (d. 2022) was one of the five original editors who worked on Volume 1, Cambridge Essays, 1888–99.  He went on to edit five other volumes in the philosophical series. His interest in the writings of Bertrand Russell goes back to his undergraduate days in the early 1950s when he was assigned some of his essays in a course. He began to read everything by the philosopher that he could find, and he also began to acquire his own copies of Russell’s books, many of which were out of print at that time on this side of the Atlantic. By the time Slater moved to the University of Toronto in 1964, he owned copies of most of Russell’s books. He has compiled the largest collection of his printed works in existence—some 10,000 items by and about him. He assisted in bringing the Russell Archives to McMaster. The original proposal for  The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell  was made in 1969 by Blackwell and Slater.

Alasdair Urquhart:  A professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Dr. Urquhart works in the general area of mathematical logic. He has also published work in universal algebra, lattice theory and computational complexity theory. Urquhart has been interested in Russell’s work in logic since he was an undergraduate student. He was inspired to work in mathematical logic after reading Russell’s  Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy . In 1994 he completed work on Volume 4 of Russell’s  Collected Papers .

Advisory Board for the Collected Papers

Kenneth Blackwell , Russell Centre, McMaster Noam Chomsky , MIT Nicholas Griffin , Russell Centre, McMaster Caroline Moorehead OBE, FRSL Charles Pigden , University of Otago Alan Ryan , Oxford University Anthony Simpson , Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Kirk Willis , University of Georgia Lawrence S. Wittner , SUNY, Albany

Major donors to the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project have been:

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Atkinson Foundation Cyrus Eaton Foundation Metcalf Foundation Samuel Rogers Memorial Trust Trinity College, Cambridge (The Newton Trust) Tokyo Club Richard Buckingham

Volumes of the Collected Papers

The McMaster University Edition

Published by Routledge .

To explore the 35 tables of contents and c.3,300 paper titles, search the combined tables of contents.

Cambridge Essays, 1888–99 [1983]

Volumes 2-11, philosophical and logical series.

2: Philosophical Papers, 1896–99 [1990] 3: Toward the “Principles of Mathematics”, 1900–02 [1993] 4: Foundations of Logic, 1903–05 [1994] 5: Toward “Principia Mathematica”, 1905–08 [2014] 6: Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–13 [1992] 7: Theory of Knowledge: the 1913 Manuscript [1984; paperbound, 1992] 8: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, 1914–19 [1986] 9: Essays on Language, Mind and Matter, 1919–26 [1988] 10: A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927–42 [1996]* 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68 [1997]*

VOLUMES 12-34

Political and cultural series.

12: Contemplation and Action, 1902–14 [1985] 13: Prophecy and Dissent, 1914–16 [1988] 14: Pacifism and Revolution, 1916–18 [1995] 15: Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919–22 [2000]* 16: Labour and Internationalism, 1922–25 [in progress] 17: Authority versus Enlightenment, 1925–27 [in progress] 18: Behaviourism and Education, 1927–31 [in progress] 19: Science and Civilization, 1931–33 [in progress] 20: Fascism and Other Depression Legacies, 1933–34 [in progress] 21: How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1935–38 [2008]* 22: The CCNY Case, 1938–40 [in progress] 23: The Problems of Democracy, 1941–44 [in progress] 24: Civilization and the Bomb, 1944–47 [in progress]* 25: Defence of the West, 1948–50 [in progress] 26: Cold War Fears and Hopes, 1950–52 [2020] 27: Culture and the Cold War, 1952–53 [in progress] 28: Man’s Peril, 1954–55 [2003]* 29: Détente or Destruction, 1955–57 [2005]* 30: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1957–59 [in progress] 31: The Committee of 100, 1960–62 [in progress] 32: A New Plan for Peace and Other Essays, 1963–64 33: The Vietnam Campaign, 1965–66 34: International War Crimes Tribunal, 1967–70

VOLUMES 35-36

New papers and indexes.

35: Newly Discovered Papers [in progress] 36: Indexes [in progress]

A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell

I: Separate Publications, 1896–1990 [1994] II: Serial Publications, 1890–1990 [1994] III: Indexes [1994]

(92) 336 3216666

[email protected]

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (full name: Bertrand Arthur William Russell) was a British Logician, philosopher, historian, mathematician, essayist, writer, political activist, social critic, and Nobel laureate. Russell regarded himself as a socialist, pacifist, and social activist; however, he was highly skeptical, and his and this skeptical nature led him to think that in a profound sense, he had never been any one of these.

In the early decades of the 20 th century, Russell initiated and directed the revolt against idealism in the English language. He has also founded the analytical philosophy with his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein, colleague G. E. Moore, and predecessor Gottlob Frege. He is regarded as a premier logician of the 20 th century. He wrote Principia Mathematica with A. N. Whitehead. In the book, they tried to create a rational basis for a mathematician. He wrote the philosophical essay “On Denoting,” which is regarded as a paradigm of philosophy.

He was a leading anti-war activist and also supported anti-imperialism. He also advocated preventive nuclear power occasionally. His pacifism caused him to go to prison during world war I. However, he later gave the statement that it was necessary to declare war against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  He also criticized Satanist totalitarianism and criticized the engrossment of the United States in the Vietnam War. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his writings in which he supports humanitarian standards of freedom of expression and thought.

Bertrand Russell’s Short Biography

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3 rd Earl Russel, was born on 18 th May 1872 in Monmouthshire, the United Kingdom to Katherine Louise and Viscount Amberley. He was born into a British aristocratic liberal family. In 1874, his mother, Katherine, died from diphtheria. In 1876, two years after his mother’s death, his father also died. Bertrand, his brother Frank and his sister Rachel started living with their Victorian grandparents.

In his teenage, Russell often suffered from spasms of seclusion and loneliness due to which he attempted suicide. He got education at home by different tutors and received no formal education from any institute. During the flourishing days of his life, he came across works of P.B. Shelley. He spent his teenage years studying Christianity deeply. When he received a scholarship, he started reading at Trinity College, Cambridge, for the mathematical Tripos. In 1890, he started studying at the same college.

Russell published his first book German Social Democracy in 1896. The book deals with the political study that shows Russell’s lifelong interest in social and political theory. In 1903, he published his first leading book on the logic of mathematics, The Principles of Mathematics . He also completed his essay “On Denoting” in 1905. However, it was published later in the philosophical journal. He also joined the Royal Society in 1908. He wrote Principia Mathematica with A. N. Whitehead, and in 1910, the first three volumes of the book were published.

During the period of World War I, Russell was among a few of the intellectuals who did not actively participate in the war. In 1916, he was expelled from Trinity College because of his views on the ‘Defense of the Realm Act.’ On BBC, Russell also participates in many broadcasts. Apart from his academic struggles, he also earned fame as the author of the newspaper and magazine articles. In 1945, he published his book A History of Western Philosophy ; it soon became one of the best-sellers. Russell was presented the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his humanistic writings.

He was suffering from Influenza and died at his home in Wales on 2 nd February 1970. He was buried on 5 th February 1970 in Colwyn Bay. At his funeral, no religious ceremony was taken according to his will.

Bertrand Russell’s Literary Style

Bertrand Russell was basically a mathematician . He made a grand contribution to his subject by publishing his book Principia Mathematica in three volumes written in collaboration with Prof. Whitehead. The book is considered to be a landmark in the history of Mathematics. He has both mathematical and scientific skills that make him write and speak with great proficiency.

By all respects, Bertrand Russell is a prolific prose writer . He wrote abundant works. He is one of the prominent writers of the 20 th century who wrote on the diverse subjects of human interest. He devoted his works to deal with the problems of philosophy, morality, ethics, social life, politics, economics, and many more. He greatly impressed the critics and readers with his literary qualities. He has rich knowledge, and his opinions are honest; there is hardly any issue or human subject that is not touched by Russell. 

Russell writes systematically on his subjects under discussion. This method was quite successful. He communicated his ideas, wit, and power of writing in a unique, influential, and logical style. In the book, Conquest of Happiness, Russell talks about his method of writing by saying that whenever he was writing on a difficult subject, he thinks about it in great interest that he is capable of for hours and days.

The reference indicates that Russell focuses on the fluency of expression and clarity of thought. He always states clear thoughts in a pure, lucid, and transparent style. Therefore, not only his subject matter was transformed but also his mode of expression. His charming style was developed through his neatness of expressions and clarity of thought, thus leaves permanent imprints on the mind of the reader.

His writing is not ornamented with “jeweled phrases,” nor do his sentences have obscurity that makes the reader halt for aesthetic pleasure. He has an intellectually brilliant style. He can easily shrink the idea into a few words without losing clarity. His language is direct, lucid, and simple. The following are some of Russell’s stylistic features.

The Precise Usage of Words

 The scientific inclination of Russell allows him to make the precise and exact usage of words in his writings. He uses rich, clear, transparent, and pure words. His writings have no obscurity of ambiguity. If there is any ambiguity, he clarifies it in the proceeding lines. He does not use irrelevant and excessive words, but he does not compromise on the richness of meaning.

Unity of Thoughts

Another salient of the style of Russell is the unity of thought. Being associated with the discipline of mathematics and logic, he mastered the principle of unity of thought. He begins his argument from a well-stated assumption and then proceeds to the logical conclusion step by step. His every essay is logical and the thoughts are developed continuously. The paragraphs are interconnected with each other. There is coherence in his arguments. He states the conclusion at the end of the essay is a brief summary of his thoughts he has expressed in the essay.

Elongated Sentences

To maintain the unity of thought, Russell uses elongated, lengthy, and elaborated sentences.  With the use of elongated sentences, he does not allow it to affect the fluency of thought and writing. His thoughts are fluent, coherent, and rhythmic from the start to end. The style of Russell provides him with the medium through which his expression of thought is smooth. His writing is dull and boring and relished the readers with its sweetness.

Simplicity of Language

Russell never used Pompous and Bombastic language. He insists on using simple and effective sentences. He does not excessively use the synonymous words that make the sentences tasteless and boring. It is due to the simplicity of his employed language that makes his writing pleasant and sweet not dull and boring. His style is simple but convincing and strikes with the interest of readers. Though the subject matter, his deals within his essays are very difficult; however, his simple mode expression makes it easy for the reader even a layman can understand what he is trying to convince. He is aware of the fact that the complexity of expression may cause ambiguity. His opening lines in the essay are so articulate. 

 “Of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past, none is so disorganized and derailed as the family.”

“Happiness depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.”

Seriousness

The writing of Russell preserves the seriousness of the subject and does not have any personal emotional effect. He was one of the greatest humanists of the 20 th century. He deeply felt the suffering and problems of humanity. He talked about the practical philosophy of human life in his essays. He was not a dogmatic preacher. He has broadmindedness, intellectual Vision, and impersonal attitude to the problems of humanity. These qualities made him a high profile, a sober and prolific writer. His style is made effective and heart-felt with his profound outlook on life. He was a completely anti-war activist and was aware of the impact of these wars on human lives and talks about it in his writings. He also focuses on the weaknesses of man. He not only talked about them but also thought about their solutions. The seriousness and sincerity of his style is depicted in his essay “Future of Mankind.”

Humor and Satire

No matter how significant the subject is, a seriousness of discussion makes the piece of work dull and boring. Though the style and subject matter both of Russell have high seriousness, it is also marked with humor, cheerfulness and satire. His writing has a humorous touch with intellectual and scholarly style. However, his humor is not overboard and outrageous. By the employment of humor and satire, he does not make his writing disgusting; it continues to appear lively and optimistic. His humor has a function of reformation. He does not only indent to pinpoint the follies of humans but also provide solutions for it and hope for future development.

Decorative Style

Russell’s style is generally known for its brevity and clarity, however, Russell can also write an embellished and florid language to show that he also has artistic command on writing. An example of his flowery and ornate/decorative style is his essay “The Free man’s Worship” published in his book Mysticism and Logic. The essay is proof that he also has artistic command on the language with nice taste.

Though many of his works are argumentative and thoughtful in nature, the clarity and unity of his thought are ruined with it. He pours out the unity of thoughts with harmony and symmetry, thus makes his expression chaste, weighty, and descriptive. Russell’s autobiography is an excellent example of his descriptive style. He describes the history of his life and narrates it in a simple, attractive, and appealing manner. The readers read it with great interest.

Lack of Symbolism

In Russell’s writing, there is no metaphorical and symbolic language. It is said previously that he has a simple and clear style and does not leave any ambiguity or obscurity in his ideas and writing both. Russell does not trouble his readers with complex symbols and metaphors and uses less complex language. Metaphors and similes for Russell are a matter of necessity, and they should only be used when there is a necessity.

Profundity in Thoughts

Russell expresses deep thoughts in simple language. He was a man with a scientific mood and also a deep thinker. His style has a depth and stream-like continuity and is full of deep thoughts that can be elaborated on in countless pages. His many sentences appear to be proverbs having deep meanings. For example: 

 “Pride of a race is even more harmful than national pride.”

“One of the most powerful sources of false belief is envy.”

“Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.”

Russell also used quotations from Shakespeare, Bible, Greek, and Roman writers and employed them in his writing in harmony with his thoughts. With phrases and quotations from the Bible makes his works sublime and style scholarly. He operates these allusions to make his ironical attacks effective.

Elegance is another noticeable characteristic of his style. Russell has mastery in conveying philosophical and technical ideas to the readers in his expressive manner. He makes his ideas clear to the readers by taking great pains, but still, his style is simple, and the complexity of his ideas does not make it laborious. 

His smooth, effortless, and impressive style is proof of his elegant style. His style is elegant and does not have any obscurity and ambiguity. He achieves this style by logical reasoning and by offering common examples to explain his ideas. For example, in his essay Unpopular Essay , he provides every thesis, every idea, every proposition, every suggestion, and every theory with relevant examples, analogies, and illustrations. He draws these examples either from everyday life or renowned facts of history. Following is the example from his essay An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, advocating his view by referring to the recognized fact of the policy of the government that education which was made to make people able to read and write appears to be capable of serving other functions. It inculcates nonsense and unifies the people to generate collection enthusiasm. If every government of every world taught the same nonsense, there would be great harm, but unfortunately, every government has its own brand and this diversity is producing hatred between the followers of different beliefs.  

Examples and Illustrations

The intellectual genius of Bertrand Russell can be seen in his illustration and abundance of examples he gives in his essays. Moreover, there are a lot of allusions in his essays. In the essay “The Future of Mankind,” he gives three examples to differentiate between the freedom that is absent in Russia but present in America. Russell gives a lot of examples in the essay “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” to illustrate the idea of how centuries-old superficial beliefs have dominated the mind of a man. 

Russell makes a statement in the essay “Ideas That Have Helped Mankind” that man by nature is good and evil and then explain this statement with references from the event of the holocaust in which the brutal German Nazi killed and badly treat the Jews, Russian’s order for the expulsion of Germans and American and British Attitude towards the German American children. All these are the real cases of instinctive evilness of man.

Russell never gives any statement with abstract ideas and philosophies. He always gives concrete examples. To illustrate his point, he also offers fables and parables. For example, in the essay, Ideas That have Harmed mankind, he gives the fable of cow grazing and then starts running away in fear of the passing train and also the fable of the bakers and the butchers.

Compressed Statements and Generalizations

Though Russell is known for his elongated sentences, he is also intellectually brilliant in writing the compressed and condensed statement and generalizing statement. These statements, most of the time, produce striking effects on the readers. Following are the random examples of Russell’s condensed and compressed sentences;

• Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. (“ An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish ”)
• Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy. (“ Philosophy and Politics ”)
•    To the propagandist his pupils are potential soldiers in an army. (“ The Functions of a Teacher”)
• Science is empirical, tentative, and undogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. (“Philosophy and Politics”)
•   Selfishness beyond a point, whether individual or national, is not wise. It may with luck succeed, but if it fails failure is terrible. (“ Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind ”)

Liberal Philosophy

Russell is a liberal in his philosophy. He does not have any prejudgments and personal likes and dislikes. He does not follow any trend. He is a philosopher who always preaches a scientific temper of mind; therefore he ceases to be narrow-minded in any sense. He has an open mind that takes in all the pervading issues of human welfare. In his book Unpopular Essays , he has expressed his views on a variety of topics such as economic, politics, ethics, psychology, morality, education, skepticism, science, civilization, communism, peace, war, government, and so many more. The style with which he handles these topics shows his liberal philosophy, catholic temper, and wide-ranging mind. His style is natural and does evolve from any doctrine or theory.

Works Of Bertrand Russell

• Eminent Men I have Known
• Ideas that have Harmed Mankind
• Ideas that have Helped Mankind
• On the Value of Scepticism
• The Harm that Good Men Do