LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Bertrand Russell
built 628 days ago
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was an unusual mixture of a popular and an academic philosopher. He was the inventor of The Theory of Descriptions. Like many philosophers he made his major contributions whilst quite young with The Principles of Mathematics (1903) and he followed this later with The Analysis of Mind (1921) and An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940). He was born the grandson of Lord John Russell, who had twice served as Prime Minister under Queen Victoria. Educated at first privately, and later at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1894 he obtained first class degrees both in mathematics and in the moral sciences.
Source:
Bertrand Russell was one of the main organizers of the Pugwash Conferences of Scientists. At the first meeting in 1957 three committees were formed-one on the hazards of atomic energy, one on the control of nuclear weapons, and one on the social responsibilities of scientists. One of the achievements of the Pugwash movement was the eventual agreement on at least a partial Test-ban Treaty. Russell considered this only a slight mitigation of the dangers. Russell was ... the President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which worked for the unilateral disarmament of Britain and the expulsion of US bases from her soil.
Source:
Bertrand Russell had one of the most widely varied and persistently influential intellects of the 20th century. During most of his active life, a span of three generations, Russell had at any time more than 40 books in print ranging over philosophy, mathematics, science, ethics, sociology, education, history, religion, politics, and polemic. The extent of his influence resulted partly from his amazing efficiency in applying his intellect (he normally wrote at the rate of 3,000 largely unaltered words a day) and partly from the deep humanitarian feeling that was the mainspring of his actions. This feeling expressed itself consistently at the frontier of social change through what he himself would have called a liberal anarchistic, left-wing, and skeptical atheist temperament.
Source:
Among Russell's own works, the first volume of Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vol. (1967–69), is his literary masterpiece: honest, self-searching, and compellingly written. A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Russell's most popular work, is brilliant and witty but, from a scholarly point of view, maddeningly partial and opinionated. Logic and Knowledge, ed. by Robert Charles Marsh (1956), is an invaluable collection of Russell's most important essays, including “On Denoting.” My Philosophical Development (1959) includes the definitive statement of Russell's “retreat from Pythagoras.” Also significant is The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. by Nicholas Griffin, of which vol. 1, The Private Years, 1884–1914 (1992), is dominated by love letters to Alys and Morrell, though it ... includes some fascinating correspondence with G.E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, and Alfred North Whitehead, among others.
Source:
Orphaned at the age of four, Bertrand Russell studied both mathematics and philosophy (with McTaggart) at Cambridge University, where he later taught. As the grandson of a British prime minister, Russell devoted much of his public effort to matters of general social concern. He was jailed for writing a pacifist pamphlet during the First World War and attacked Bolshevism and Stalin in 1920, after visiting the Soviet Union. Russell supported the battle against Fascism during World War II but continued to protest Western colonialization and publicly deplored the development of weapons of mass destruction, as is evident in "The Bomb and Civilization" (1945),
Source:
Bertrand Russell was born in Trelleck, Gwent, the second son of Viscount Amberley. His mother, Katherine, was the daughter of Baron Stanley of Aderley. She died of diphtheria in 1874. Her husband died twenty months later, after a long period of gradually increasing debility. Lord Amberley was a friend of John Stuart Mill - he was "philosophical, studious, unworldly, morose, and priggish," wrote Russell later in his autobiography. Katherine, whom Russell only knew from her diary and her letters, he described as "vigorous, lively, witty, serious, original, and fearless." When she died she was buried without any religious ceremony.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Bertrand Russell