Bertrand Russell

Key ideas

In 1901 Russell discovered that the naive idea of a set leads to contradiction: consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. This is Russell's paradox. With Alfred North Whitehead he spent a decade on Principia Mathematica, an attempt to derive mathematics from logic while avoiding such paradoxes through type theory.

His theory of descriptions, which analyses phrases like 'the present King of France' so that sentences about non-existent things can still be meaningful and false, became a model for analytic philosophy.

In The Problems of Philosophy he gave a memorable version of the problem of induction: the chicken that has been fed every day expects to be fed again, until the day its neck is wrung. He also proposed that the world might have sprung into existence five minutes ago, complete with false memories, as a test of what our evidence about the past really shows.

“Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.”

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, ch. 15 (1912)

Life, briefly

Russell was born into an aristocratic political family; his grandfather had twice been prime minister. He was orphaned young and raised by his grandmother. He taught at Cambridge, lost his post and was later jailed for six months for opposing the First World War, and campaigned against nuclear weapons into his nineties.

He wrote more than seventy books, married four times, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

Major works

• The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
• Principia Mathematica (with Whitehead, 1910–13)
• The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
• The Analysis of Mind (1921)
• A History of Western Philosophy (1945)

Schools of thought

Logical positivism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Bertrand Russell
• WikipediaBertrand Russell