Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, Nobel laureate, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His primary focus early in his career was mathematics. His first major work is called The Principles of Mathematics (1902) in which he endeavored to make math more accessible.

Russell sought to look at problems in philosophy through the objective eyes of logic and to find solutions to the big philosophical issues with the determination of a man of science.

His Writings

Russell was a longtime collaborator of fellow philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. Together, they composed the massive Principia Mathematica, a masterpiece that established the interconnection between logic and mathematics. This mammoth volume was considered a work of genius.

In The Problems of Philosophy, Russell sought to discredit the philosophy of Idealism, which suggested that physical reality is not real at all, and all objects we perceived through the senses are actually created in the mind. Russell was a realist and felt that this was poppycock in the extreme. Russell was an Empiricist, who believed that everything we know must be acquired through sensory experience. Like the Objectivists and the Empiricists, Russell believed that the outside world had a reality all its own and exists whether we see it or think about it.

His Political Background

Russell was no stranger to the lockup. At the age of eighty-nine, he was arrested at an antinuclear protest. His protests of the World War I caused him to lose his teaching job at Cambridge and end up in prison. Like many intellectuals of the day, he was intrigued by the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union. Unlike many of them, he had the good sense to condemn the form of government that rose to power. The totalitarianism and oppression did not match his notions of what an ideal socialist state should be.

His Attacks on Christianity

In addition to being a philosopher, Russell was primarily an educator. He taught in China and was headmaster of the exclusive Beacon Hill School in England. Among the books that got Russell in hot water with some holier-than-thou American academics were What I Believe, Why I Am Not a Christian, and Manners and Morals. Russell opined that the millennia worth of “proofs” of the existence of God proposed by philosophers were ineffectual at best. And he was quick to remind the world of the many atrocities committed in the name of God and other deleterious side effects of adhering to the Christian ethic. Russell also spoke candidly, advocating freedom of sexual expression and the hypocrisy and destructiveness of bourgeois morality.

Logical Analysis

Just as pop stars periodically reinvent themselves, Bertrand Russell changed boats in the philosophical stream from time to time. However, he maintained that his philosophies followed a consistent course, and he did remain at heart an Empiricist. He had great respect for science, which he believed was the best source to knowledge. Physical reality was not a realm of Ideas; it was very real and independent and was perceived by, not created by, the mind.

Russell sought to create a system he called logical analysis, whereby a particular concept or proposition could be deconstructed and all its parts examined to gain knowledge and understanding. This is also called Logical Atomism. Simply put, this means that the world is composed of facts, not unlike the atoms that make up physical reality. A proposition is a collection of these “atoms.”

In On the Relations of Universals and Particulars, Russell was able to use logical analysis to, as he said it, finally have the last word on the nagging problem of Aristotelian Universals. He was able to logically “prove” that both Universals and particulars can exist. Of course there is never a “last word” in the wonderful world of philosophy.