Philosopher
Bertrand Russell
1872–1970
British philosopher and logician who argued that mathematics reduces to logic, helped found analytic philosophy, and campaigned for peace.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic. With Alfred North Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, which aimed to show that mathematics can be derived from logic, a programme threatened by the paradox that bears his name. His theory of descriptions, first set out in “On Denoting” (1905), became a model of philosophical analysis.
Russell was also a public intellectual: his writings against the First World War led to his dismissal from Trinity College, Cambridge, and later to five months in prison, and he campaigned against nuclear weapons late in life. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. He was an early teacher of Wittgenstein.
Key ideas
- “Russell’s paradox”
- Consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. It is a member of itself if and only if it isn’t. Russell discovered the paradox in 1901, while working on his Principles of Mathematics.
- Logicism
- Russell championed the view that mathematics is, in some important sense, reducible to logic. With Whitehead he developed the theory of types to avoid paradoxes like his own.
- Definite descriptions
- Phrases like “the author of Waverley” need not refer to anything to be meaningful. Logical analysis shows the underlying form of such sentences, so we don’t have to believe in the existence of golden mountains or unicorns.
- Philosophy as analysis
- Russell wanted a “scientific method” in philosophy, testing hypotheses against evidence and using the new logic to expose the logical form hidden beneath ordinary language. With G. E. Moore, he is generally recognised as a founder of analytic philosophy.
- Neutral monism
- The world consists of one kind of stuff that is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical. What we call mental and physical differ only in arrangement and context.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- England
- Period
- Contemporary
Influences
Influenced by
Bertrand Russell1872–1970
Influenced
Influenced by
Bertrand Russell1872–1970
Influenced
Key works
- On Denoting, 1905
- Principia Mathematica
Sources
- Andrew David Irvine, Bertrand Russell, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy