Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, essayist, and social critic whose work profoundly influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Born at Trelleck, Monmouthshire, into an aristocratic British family, Russell was orphaned at the age of three and educated privately before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and philosophy and became a fellow in 1895. His early philosophical work helped develop analytic philosophy and, with Alfred North Whitehead, culminated in Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), an ambitious attempt to provide logical foundations for mathematics. Russell also made major contributions to the philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics, while becoming increasingly prominent as a public intellectual on questions of war, education, religion, morality, and political freedom. His pacifism during the First World War led to his dismissal from a Cambridge lectureship and imprisonment in 1918. He later became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons and participated in international campaigns for peace and disarmament. In 1950, Russell received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his varied and significant writings in which he championed humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.