LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Bertrand Russell: Alfred North Whitehead
built 615 days ago
It was on this date, May 18, 1872, that British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Arthur William Russell, the third Earl Russell, was born in Trelleck, Monrnouthshire, Wales. Early in his writing career he embraced materialism. His Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and published in 1910-1913.
Source:
When he was 18 years old, Russell entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Alfred North Whitehead was the first to sense Russell's extraordinary talent, and he quickly undertook to sponsor Russell among the Cambridge literati. In his second year at Cambridge Russell was elected to the Apostles, a weekly discussion group that since 1820 has included among its members many of the people of intellectual eminence at Cambridge. There he met and formed close friendships with, among others, G. Lowes Dickinson, G. E. Moore, and John McTaggart, and a little later with John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. Of his generation at Cambridge, Russell later wrote, "We believed in ordered progress by means of politics and free discussion."
Source:
At Cambridge Russell's life was lit with the friendship and intellectual stimulus which had been absent from Pembroke Lodge. Alfred North Whitehead, who had recommended his scholarship, was his teacher, colleague and in due course collaborator. His many friends included the Trevelyan brothers and G. E. Moore, whose philosophy was eventually to influence him profoundly. The elite debating club, the Apostles, elected him into their company. Here it was that he heard Moore read a paper which began, 'In the beginning was matter, and matter begat the devil, and the devil begat God'. 'The paper ended with the death first of God and then of the devil, leaving matter alone as in the beginning' (Autobiography).
Source:
Eventually, Russell's attempts to overcome the paradox resulted in a complete transformation of his scheme of logic, as he added one refinement after another to the basic theory. In the process, important elements of his “Pythagorean” view of logic were abandoned. In particular, Russell came to the conclusion that there were no such things as classes and propositions and that therefore, whatever logic was, it was not the study of them. In their place he substituted a bewilderingly complex theory known as the ramified theory of types, which, though it successfully avoided contradictions such as Russell's Paradox, was (and remains) extraordinarily difficult to understand. By the time he and his collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead, had finished the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910–13), the theory of types and other innovations to the basic logical system had made it unmanageably complicated. Very few people, whether philosophers or mathematicians, have made the gargantuan effort required to master the details of this monumental work.
Source:
Russell earned his reputation as a distinguished thinker by his work in mathematics and logic. In 1903 he published The Principles of Mathematics and by 1913 he and Alfred North Whitehead had published the three volumes of Principia Mathematica. Although Russell was an analytic rationalist all of his life, he did have a significant mystical experience in 1901 which influenced his values for the rest of his life. In his Autobiography he described what happened.
Source:
In 1900, Russell became acquainted with the work of the Italian mathematician Peano, which inspired him to write "The Principles of Mathematics (1903)" and later this work expanded into three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910-13) in collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead. The research, which Russell did during this period, establishes him as one of the founding fathers of modern analytical philosophy. His Principia Mathematica coauthored with A. N. Whitehead, is one of the monumental works in the history of logic.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Alfred North Whitehead