Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, agnostic, socialist, pacifist, and social critic.[2] Although he spent most of his life in England, he was born in Wales where he also died. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy."[4] His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, eugenics, set theory, linguistics, and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. ####Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy, a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest in political and social theory. In 1896, he taught German social democracy at the London School of Economics, where he also lectured on the science of power in the autumn of 1937. In 1905 he wrote the essay "On Denoting", which was published in the philosophical journal Mind. Russell became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908.[7] The first of three volumes of Principia Mathematica, written with Whitehead, was published in 1910, which, along with the earlier The Principles of Mathematics, soon made Russell world famous in his field. In 1910 he became a lecturer in the University of Cambridge where he soon received an approach from the Austrian engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became his PhD student and whom he viewed as a genius and a successor who would continue his work on logic. Before the Second World War, Russell taught at the University of Chicago, later moving on to Los Angeles to lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York in 1940, but after a public outcry, the appointment was annulled by a court judgement: his opinions (especially those relating to sexual morality, detailed in Marriage and Morals ten years earlier) made him "morally unfit" to teach at the college.

Views on philosophy
Russell is generally credited with being one of the founders of analytic philosophy. He was deeply impressed by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and wrote on every major area of philosophy except aesthetics. He was particularly prolific in the field of metaphysics, the logic and the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, ethics and epistemology.

Views on society
Political and social activism occupied much of Russell's time for most of his life, which makes his prodigious and seminal writing on a wide range of technical and non-technical subjects all the more remarkable. Russell remained politically active almost to the end of his life, writing to and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. Also was famously noted for saying "No one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God."