FRIDAY FILOSOPHY c.8.20.21
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970 was a British polymath.
As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He was a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.
Russell was one of the early 20th century’s most prominent logicians, and one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell’s article “On Denoting” has been considered a “paradigm of philosophy”.
Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He occasionally advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would “welcome with enthusiasm” world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Throughout his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he later wrote he had “never been any of these things, in any profound sense”.
- Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.
- The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.
- A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
- Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
- I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
- The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
- To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
The Time is Now