British philosopher, logician, and Nobel literature laureate (1950) who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Whitehead and led 20th-century pacifist and nuclear-disarmament campaigns.
Closely associated with
Alfred North Whitehead (Principia Mathematica co-author) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (his student-then-rival).
For an intellectual contrast, see
F.H. Bradley, British Idealist philosopher — Russell's 1898 break with Bradley's neo-Hegelian Idealism — and his subsequent logical-atomism — is the founding moment of the Anglo-American analytic philosophy tradition that displaced Idealism for a century. Russell's entire early career is structured against Bradley's metaphysics of internal relations.
The standard scholarly entry points to Bertrand Russell's work:
Ray Monk (Southampton, philosophy biographer) — Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 (1996);
A.C. Grayling (New College of the Humanities) — Russell: A Very Short Introduction (1996).
These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Bertrand Russell.
