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Rocky Start
Russell lost much of his family in his first few years of life. At the age of 1, he lost his godfather John Stuart Mill, at 2 he lost his mother and sister, at 4 he lost his father and at 6 he lost his grandfather. This caused him to be raised by his very religious grandmother, he contemplated suicide during his early life because of this upbringing and didn't follow through because of a desire to learn more mathematics. At age 18 he became an atheist. -
Started college University of Cambridge
He studied at Trinity College Cambridge where he met a younger G.E. Moore and older Alfred North Whitehead both who were influential throughout the rest of his life. He then abandoned his study of Mathematics for philosophy. -
Analytic Philosophy
Russell was also an important influence in the founding of analytic philosophy and the rise of logical positivism. He thought that one of the principal goals of philosophy was to create a fully logical language in which everything could be reduced to relationships between logical atoms and us as vacated entities for logical constructions. That could either be broken down to the rules of logic into logical atoms or were themselves logical atoms. -
Principles of Mathmatica
He expresses that the whole of mathematics could be derived from a square root and few axioms, but was confined to logical notions such as proposition and class. Doing this he said that not only could the truths of mathematics be shown to be immune from doubt, but they could also be freed from any taint of subjectivity, like in his earlier works Kantian view that geometry describes special intuition. -
Denoting
Russell believes that a denoting phrase is phase that denoted a semantical property. For example, Russell was interested in phrases like a woman, some students, the tallest mountain, any father, all people between the ages of ten and thirty-five, and every student at SMU. What all these things have in common is that they are either a noun or noun phase and each is preceded by a determiner or a determiner phrase. -
Received Nobel Peace prize for his Literature
During this time he was appointed as a professor of City College of New York, but later dismissed because of his atheism and views on sex and marriage found in his book "Marriage and Morals", which he claims is the text that won him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1950. https://youtu.be/z5JQjcSfUO0 -
