Bertrand Russell Biography

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, better known as Bertrand Russell, was born on May 18, 1872, in Trelleck (Wales) and died on February 2nd, 1970 at the age of 97 years.

Being six years old, Russell would become orphaned after the death of his sister and his mother, and later his father, in 1878. According to his own autobiography, his desire to learn more about mathematics was what got him away from suicide.

“At the age of 11, I started as a tutor of Euclid, my brother who was seven years older. It was one of the great events of my life, like the first love. I had not been able to imagine that there was anything so delicious in the world.”  Bertrand Russell

He began his education at Trinity College, Cambridge. Once he graduated, in 1888, he was sent to the United States to complement his studies and so that he could study the political life and institutions of the country.

In 1894, Russell would marry Alys Smith. However, the marriage did not last long.

He made his name popular with the Principles of Mathematics in 1902. Between 1910 and 1913, he wrote Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles), a work that has 3 volumes. His next great work was The Problems of Philosophy

(1912), in which he turned to mathematics, sociology, psychology, and physics to refute the doctrines of idealism. In 1919, Bertrand Russell wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and a year later he published The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism.

Bertrand Russell lived in Russia during 1920. Between 1921 and 1922 he worked as a professor at Peking University (China). During his stay in Beijing, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to it being rumored in several European newspapers that he had died. Also during this period, specifically in 1921, he married his second wife, Dora Black.

He returned to his country and published a series of texts that contributed to his national recognition: The Analysis of mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927). From 1928 to 1932, he directed the Beacon Hill School, a very progressive private school where innovative teaching methods for children were applied. In the United States, he wrote A History of Western Philosophy (1945).

For texts such as What I Believe (1925) and his defense of sexual freedom, manifested in Marriage and Morals (1929), The Conquest of Happiness (1930) and Education and the Social Order (1932), he was banned from teaching in New York

, for what they considered attacks religion.

In 1950, Bertrand was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “In recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he has fought for humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

In 1953, he published the novel Satan in the suburbs and other stories.

Bertrand Russell died on February 2, 1970, at his home, Plas Penrhyn, in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales. His body was incinerated in Colwyn Bay on February 5, 1970. According to his will, there was no religious ceremony; his ashes were scattered in the mountains of Wales.

Bertrand Russell could be just a brilliant mathematician who won a Nobel. But he also was a philosopher who, for his writings, won the prize in the category of Literature. He was an activist who defended the rights of women and who lost jobs for supporting sexual freedom at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a pacifist that rejected the First World War and was sent to jail. The one that opposed Hitler, Stalinism, the US invasion of Vietnam, nuclear bombs and racial segregation. The one who made peace, his struggle. Besides, Russell was the one that three months before his death, with 97 years, appealed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations to support a commission against the war crimes committed by the Americans in the Asian country.

Bertrand Russell was an intellectual in the broadest and deepest sense of the word.

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly intense, have ruled my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and an unbearable pity for the suffering of humanity” Bertrand Russell.

Russell considered the intellectual’s mission to spread a culture that accustomed men to the revision of their own ideas and mutual tolerance. I knew that science, as such, is not enough for the happiness of human beings, who, in the pursuit of this goal, must resort to art, to love and to reciprocal respect.

His theory of knowledge is real and wants to connect with the intuitions of ordinary common sense. On one hand, he is the heir of the old tradition of British empiricism, a philosophical current always linked to the spirit of liberalism and the Enlightenment, which aims to reduce all cognitive content to the data of sensory experience. On the other hand, he is the most ambitious contemporary logician, obsessed with the idea of ​​a perfect symbolic language that eliminates all expressive ambiguity. The result of all these concerns is the so-called Russell’s logical atomism.