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Bertrand Russell: Works
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In their early years of marriage Russell and Alys much enjoyed travel, for pleasure and study. They visited Berlin in 1895 and Russell set about a study of the German Social Democratic Party. He recalled a moment one spring morning in the Tiergarten when he planned to 'write a series of books in the philosophy of sciences, growing gradually more concrete as I passed from mathematics to biology; I thought I would ... write a series of books on social and political questions, growing gradually more abstract'. His plan to write the most technical (and abstruse) books and the most popular journalism was fully achieved. His first published work. German Social Democracy (1896), arose from a series of lectures he gave at the London School of Economics and placed German socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, while also suggesting a debt to Kant and Hegel which turned it from a political party into a 'self-contained philosophy of the world and of human development', making it 'a religion and an ethic'.
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From the 1920s Russell lived by lecturing and journalism. He pursued his philosophical work in THE ANALYSIS OF MIND (1921) and THE ANALYSIS OF MATTER (1927). Between 1920 and 1921 he was professor at Peking and in 1927 he founded a progressive school at Beacon Hill, on the Sussex Downs with his former student and second wife Dora Black. In ON EDUCATION (1926) Russell called for an education that would liberate the child from unthinking obedience to parental and religious authority. The experiment at Beacon Hill lasted for five years and provided material for the book EDUCATION AND SOCIAL ORDER (1932).
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Russell's first mathematical book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, was published in 1897. This work was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant. Russell soon realized that the conception it laid out would have made Albert Einstein's schema of space-time impossible, which he understood to be superior to his own system. Thenceforth, he rejected the entire Kantian program as it related to mathematics and geometry, and he maintained that his own earliest work on the subject was nearly without value.[35]
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A few years later Russell's views on mathematics deepened further, and he became "reluctantly convinced" that mathematics consists of tautologies. With Whitehead he undertook the enormous project of trying to show that mathematics - in particular, arithmetic, but in principle, all mathematics - was an extension of logic, that no underived concepts and no unproved assumptions need be introduced other than those of pure logic. The results were published as Principia Mathematica in three volumes (1910-1913). Russell and Whitehead each had to put up £50 toward publication costs. In spite of mistakes and later improvements, the work remains a landmark in the history of mathematics.
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The development of nuclear weapons caused Bertrand Russell deep concern. In November 1945 he gave a speech in the House of Lords warning that atomic weapons were going to be made more destructive and cheaper. Understanding nuclear physics, he explained how a hydrogen bomb with much more explosive force could work. He predicted that soon the Russians would have bombs as destructive as those of the United States. He recommended that nuclear weapons be under international control, and he supported the Baruch Plan for an International Atomic Development Authority. Such great danger did he see if Russia and other nations developed atomic weapons that during this period when the United States was the only nuclear power he advocated that the US ought to force the Russians to accept a world government under American leadership, even by going to war against Russia if necessary.
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Some see Russell's influence as mostly negative, primarily those who have been critical of Russell's emphasis on science and logic, the consequent diminishment of metaphysics, and of his insistence that ethics lies outside of philosophy. Russell's admirers and detractors are often more acquainted with his pronouncements on social and political matters, or what some (e.g., Ray Monk) have called his "journalism," than they are with his technical, philosophical work. Among non-philosophers, there is a marked tendency to conflate these matters, and to judge Russell the philosopher on what he himself would certainly consider to be his non-philosophical opinions. Russell often cautioned people to make this distinction.
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