Bertrand Russell's secular godfather was John Stuart Mill, who died a year later
Born into a Whig dynasty, Bertrand Russell was orphaned at four and raised by a Presbyterian grandmother who overturned his father's wish that he grow up agnostic. He became a founder of analytic philosophy, tried to rebuild mathematics on pure logic, went to prison as a pacifist and won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Russell was born in 1872 at Ravenscroft in Monmouthshire. His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, scandalised society by backing birth control, and his father picked Mill as a nonreligious godfather. By early 1876 both parents and his sister Rachel were dead, and Bertrand and his brother Frank went to their grandparents at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. Grandfather John Russell had twice been prime minister; grandmother Frances, conservative in religion yet supportive of Darwinism and Irish Home Rule, shaped his lifelong readiness to stand on principle.
He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a first in 1893. At first he followed British idealism, the reigning philosophy, but friendship with G. E. Moore drew him into a revolt against it, trading monism and dialectic for pluralism and logical analysis. With Gottlob Frege before him and his student Ludwig Wittgenstein after, he is counted among the founders of analytic philosophy.
His most ambitious project, written with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, was Principia Mathematica, a landmark of classical logic that aimed to derive all of mathematics from logic. His essay On Denoting has been hailed as a model of how philosophy should be done. Across more than 70 books and thousands of essays, lectures and letters he ranged from epistemology to ethics and politics.
His politics shifted with events. Jailed for pacifism during the First World War, he at first favoured appeasing Hitler but changed his mind in 1943, calling war the lesser of two evils. After 1945 he preferred American dominance to Soviet rule or a leadership vacuum, later attacked Stalinism, condemned the Vietnam War and campaigned for nuclear disarmament. He chaired the India League, and in 1950 received the Nobel Prize in Literature for writings championing humanitarian ideals and free thought.
Source: Bertrand Russell
