Bertrand Russell's Life Part One

A logician, mathematician, philosopher, atheist, and social activist, Bertrand Russell has established his prominence among twentieth century philosophers by propounding ideological viewpoints that keep basic principles of logic on the forefront of truth perception. His metaphysics, ethics, and views concerning the supernatural then, have a natural outgrowth from the analytic philosophy for which he is most famous. To Russell, the essence of life is enjoying love, increasing knowledge, and diminishing suffering, so far as it depends on the individual. And his entire life reflects these goals.

Russell was born on May 18, 1872 in Wales to an outspoken political activist family. His parents worked in the suffrage cause and sought to make family planning prevalent within society by becoming involved in the political process. His grandparents, particularly his grandfather, Lord John Russell maintained this passion as he was one of the chief contributors to the democratization of Parliament by writing the Reform Bill of 1832. Because his mother, father, and sister all died when he was not yet four years old, these grandparents would be the ones to raise him with the help of tutors. At an early age, Russell studied nature and geometry, developing a passion for mathematics.

This passion for mathematics would be flourishing later in his life as he entered college and wrote some of his first works. In 1890, the student enrolled at Cambridge to study math and then later studied philosophy under Sidgwich, Ward, and Stout. It was in his early college days that he admired idealism, a view which he later disbanded. An author of seventy-one books and booklets, Russell’s first one was concerning politics, German Social Democracy, which he held as an important endeavor all throughout his life. Later he wrote An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry and A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Still holding to the importance of mathematics, Russell wanted to write on the question as to whether math can have a logical foundation of which men can be certain, so he took to this task in The Principles of Mathematics. The second part of this book he wrote with his friend Whitehead and penned Principia Mathematica.

From college, Russell went on to teach philosophy, first at UCLA and then as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Later, Russell taught at the City College of New York but was ousted for his “irreligious and immoral” views, especially on sexuality. The bold and outspoken atheist maintained that young boys should be educated in the realm of sexuality and also advocated for open marriages, with both partners seeking the expressions of their desires outside of the marital relationship. It was for this type of position in written form that the philosopher received a Noble Prize for Literature in his book Marriage and Morals in 1948. And it was on the basis of this type of position that he rationalized the four marriages that he took part in, three of which were open. In this manner, his ethical system in theory was certainly consistent with his ethical system in practice.