Bertrand Russell, from the English school of clever chaps
The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy describes Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970) as ‘a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy.’
As usual, such dry descriptions tell only half the story. Russell himself tended to present his ideas in crisp and amusing terms, and one gets the feeling that an evening in his company would have been worth the going rate at the time. ‘The whole problem with the world.’ He once remarked. ‘Is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.’
He also was of the modern British school of philosophy, influenced by the great universities of the age, and as such his work is technical, and for the most part wholly inaccessible to the lay philosopher. He worked in the areas of logic, specifically the position that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic. He refined Gottlob Frege’s predicate calculus, which apparently still remains at the root of contemporary systems of logic. He championed the concept of neutral monism, which is the notion that the world consists of a single type of substance, which is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical. When time allowed, he explored definite descriptions, logical atomism and logical types.
You get the idea. Bertrand Russell was no polymath, but he certainly was a man of notable genius. In the course of a long career – he was ninety-seven when he died – he made notable contributions to subjects and diverse as ethics, politics, educational theory, the history of ideas and religious studies.
His great advantage, however, was that, like Voltaire, he wrote with flair and wit, and his many writings on many themes were read as much for their didactic value as their creative brilliance. He was not without controversy, however, for a man with such a powerful intellect, educated to the degree that he was, he was apt to be both supremely self-confident and entirely unafraid of stirring up heresy. He was dismissed from both Trinity College, Cambridge, and City College, New York, which was an achievement he was extremely proud of. At the age of seventy-seven, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and ended his days on the front line of the anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s. Some words of wisdom from Bertrand Russell to end:
‘It may seem to some that I care only about knowledge and reason. That is not so. I know how precarious is the foundation of knowledge in the mind of man; that each of us knows the world through our senses and that we may be deceived as to the nature of reality. But it is impossible to live without faith in a world beyond our individual sense perceptions. We cannot possess knowledge of ‘right and wrong’ but we are bound to have opinions. And we are such that reason is the mere servant of passion.’