Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was an English philosopher, logician, and social reformer. Regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century and a founder of analytic philosophy, Russell wrote over 70 books and thousands of other articles, essays, lectures, and letters. His writings concerned mathematical, logical, philosophical, epistemological, political, and moral topics.
A grandson of John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Russell was orphaned at the age of four and was primarily influenced by his grandmother Frances. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and graduated with a first-class degree in 1893. Russell was initially an adherent of British idealism, the dominant philosophy of the time. His friendship with G. E. Moore, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge, led Russell to embrace analytic philosophy. In the "revolt against idealism" co-led by Moore, he rejected dialectic, monism, and idealism and championed logical analysis and pluralism.
Russell was one of the early 20th century's prominent logicians and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy".
Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the England-based India League. He went to prison for his pacifism during the First World War, and he initially supported appeasing Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, before changing his view in 1943, describing war as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of the Second World War, he welcomed American global hegemony in preference to either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He later criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, condemned the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, and became an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.
In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).