Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 in Wales, into a family of English aristocrats who believed, not unreasonably, that they knew best. His parents died when he was very young, and he was raised by his grandmother, a woman of strong opinions and strict morals. He grew up in a large house full of books and silence, which suited him. From an early age he found that the clearest way to think about the world was through mathematics, and it was mathematics that first led him to philosophy — or rather, to the question that has quietly tormented philosophers for centuries: what, if anything, can we actually know for certain?

He spent much of his long life — he lived to ninety-seven — asking uncomfortable questions and giving answers that made people uneasy. He wrote about mathematics and logic, about knowledge and its limits, about why human beings so often behave foolishly, and about how they might, with some effort, behave better. His Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead, attempted to build all of mathematics on pure logic — a project of extraordinary ambition that taught him, among other things, that extraordinary ambitions are often only partly successful. His History of Western Philosophy made two thousand years of difficult thinking readable, even enjoyable, which is a minor miracle. He also wrote The Problems of Philosophy, a short book that is an excellent place to begin for anyone who has wondered whether the world outside their window is quite what it appears to be.

Russell won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, though he spent far more energy arguing against nuclear weapons and unnecessary wars than collecting prizes. He was married four times, arrested twice for protesting, and never, so far as anyone can tell, bored. He believed that a good life requires both love and knowledge — that feeling and thinking are not enemies but partners — and he wrote about this with a directness that could be warm, and an honesty that could be sharp. He did not think it was his job to tell people what to believe. He thought it was his job to show them how to think, which he considered far more useful, and considerably more difficult.