His letters provide revealing autobiographical insights and illuminate a state of mind that veered from boundless hope about his future intellectual and personal life to listless anguish and jealous recriminations. In his cell Russell read extensively in history and fiction as well as philosophy. He cultivated a particular interest in memoirs of the French Revolution — not to seek solace from the past but because he was struck by the parallels between those turbulent times and his own.
A remarkable cast of characters from contemporary British intellectual and literary life appears in the prison correspondence; although confined to Brixton, Russell still managed to participate more than vicariously in their conversations and debates.
Even his humdrum entreaties to prison authorities retain a certain curiosity for shedding light on British penal practice. Always intruding was the war, which Russell gloomily foresaw continuing even as German military resistance was starting to crumble during the final weeks of his sentence which ended, suddenly and six weeks early, on 14 September. Although he continued to extend moral support to the conscientious objector movement, and tried to ensure that he himself would not be called up for military service after his release, Russell exhibited little interest in shaping pacifist political strategy from inside Brixton.
Above all, perhaps, many of the prison letters are exceedingly intimate, as Russell revisited the failures of his past romance with Lady Ottoline Morrell and keenly anticipated an idyllic post-Brixton future which eluded him with his current lover, Lady Constance Malleson.
Background years ago, philosopher Bertrand Russell was prosecuted for an editorial he wrote. Leave a Reply Name required Email required Message.
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Please click below to consent to the use of this technology while browsing our site. In his draft of the Principles of Mathematics , Russell summarizes the problem as follows: The axiom that all referents with respect to a given relation form a class seems, however, to require some limitation, and that for the following reason. We saw that some predicates can be predicated of themselves.
Consider now those … of which this is not the case. For this predicate will either be predicable or not predicable of itself. If it is predicable of itself, it is one of those referents by relation to which it was defined, and therefore, in virtue of their definition, it is not predicable of itself. Conversely, if it is not predicable of itself, then again it is one of the said referents, of all of which by hypothesis it is predicable, and therefore again it is predicable of itself.
This is a contradiction. CP, Vol. For example, on this view, an ordinary physical object that normally might be thought to be known only through inference may be defined instead as a certain series of appearances, connected with each other by continuity and by certain causal laws. To say that a certain aspect is an aspect of a certain thing will merely mean that it is one of those which, taken serially, are the thing.
There are things that we know without asking the opinion of men of science. If you are too hot or too cold, you can be perfectly aware of this fact without asking the physicist what heat and cold consist of. As Russell puts it, even in logic and mathematics We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science.
Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps. Although we were in agreement, I think that we differed as to what most interested us in our new philosophy.
I think that Moore was most concerned with the rejection of idealism, while I was most interested in the rejection of monism. In contrast to this doctrine, Russell proposed his own new doctrine of external relations: The doctrine of internal relations held that every relation between two terms expresses, primarily, intrinsic properties of the two terms and, in ultimate analysis, a property of the whole which the two compose. With some relations this view is plausible.
Take, for example, love or hate. If A loves B, this relation exemplifies itself and may be said to consist in certain states of mind of A. Even an atheist must admit that a man can love God. It follows that love of God is a state of the man who feels it, and not properly a relational fact. But the relations that interested me were of a more abstract sort. Suppose that A and B are events, and A is earlier than B. I do not think that this implies anything in A in virtue of which, independently of B, it must have a character which we inaccurately express by mentioning B.
Leibniz gives an extreme example. He says that, if a man living in Europe has a wife in India and the wife dies without his knowing it, the man undergoes an intrinsic change at the moment of her death. For example, consider two numbers, one of which is found earlier than the other in a given series: If A is earlier than B, then B is not earlier than A.
If you try to express the relation of A to B by means of adjectives of A and B, you will have to make the attempt by means of dates. You may say that the date of A is a property of A and the date of B is a property of B, but that will not help you because you will have to go on to say that the date of A is earlier than the date of B, so that you will have found no escape from the relation. This distinction between logical forms allows Russell to explain three important puzzles.
Sentence 3 , for example, is a necessary truth, while sentence 4 is not. The affinities of a given thing are quite different in the two orders, and its causes and effects obey different laws. Two objects may be connected in the mental world by the association of ideas, and in the physical world by the law of gravitation. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
It is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must be something reasonable about it. I do not think this view can be held by anyone who has studied history. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt.
But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man.
Today, no one believes that the world was created in BC; but not so very long ago skepticism on this point was thought an abominable crime … It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of Freethinkers A, It is intellectual blindness not to recognize the revolutionary import of early Christianity, whatever the contemporary feeling concerning the sacrament of marriage may be, when it set itself like a wall against the tides of boundless sensuality and impressed upon the Roman world the sanctity of human life.
Kayden , 88 Contrary to what was often said about his personal life, it is also worth noting that Russell did not practice or defend a libertine ethic. As Wood also notes, Perhaps the finest tribute to his success is that few people now even realize the nature of the old ideas. Russell, it must be repeated, was fighting a cruel and indefensible state of affairs where sexual ignorance was deliberately fostered, so a boy might think the changes of puberty were signs of some dreadful disease, and a girl might marry without knowing anything of what lay ahead of her on her bridal night; were women were taught to look on sex, not as a source of joy, but of painful matrimonial duty; where prudery went to the extent of covering the legs of pianos in draperies; where artificial mystery evoked morbid curiosity, and where humbug went hand in hand with unhappiness ….
Russell says much the same thing when he notes that Religion has three main aspects. In the second place there is theology. In the third place there is institutionalized religion, i. Schilpp , —6. As Russell explains, Suppose, for instance, your child is ill.
Love makes you wish to cure it, and science tells you how to do so. There is not an intermediate stage of ethical theory, where it is demonstrated that your child had better be cured. Your act springs directly from desire for an end, together with knowledge of means. This is equally true of all acts, whether good or bad. Instead, they are positively frustrated: If theology is thought necessary to virtue and if candid inquirers see no reason to think the theology true, the authorities will set to work to discourage candid inquiry.
In former centuries, they did so by burning the inquirers at the stake. In Russia they still have methods which are little better; but in Western countries the authorities have perfected somewhat milder forms of persuasion. Of these, schools are perhaps the most important: the young must be preserved from hearing the arguments in favour of the opinions which the authorities dislike, and those who nevertheless persist in showing an inquiring disposition will incur social displeasure and, if possible, be made to feel morally reprehensible.
A, Societies as well as individuals, says Russell, need to choose whether the good life is one that is guided by honest inquiry and the weighing of evidence, or by the familiarity of superstition and the comforts of religion.
Partly this is due to our need to understand nature, but equally important is our need to understand each other: The thing, above all, that a teacher should endeavor to produce in his pupils, if democracy is to survive, is the kind of tolerance that springs from an endeavor to understand those who are different from ourselves.
One of the best summaries is given by Alan Wood: Russell sometimes maintained, partly I think out of perverseness, that there was no connection between his philosophical and political opinions. This was perfectly legitimate, and even praiseworthy, in a world which never stays the same, and where changing circumstances continually change the balance of arguments on different sides. If they are successful, they carry out the behest of Power, becoming themselves as powerful, in terms of Mr.
Even though they spread the good life to millions, the more successful they are, the more usurpatious and dangerous. As a young man, he says, he spent part of each day for many weeks reading Georg Cantor, and copying out the gist of him into a notebook. At that time I falsely supposed all his arguments to be fallacious, but I nevertheless went through them all in the minutest detail. This stood me in good stead when later on I discovered that all the fallacies were mine.
Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications, Muirhead ed. Norton, Slater ed. Pears ed. Schapiro, C. Darlington, Francis Watson, W. Aa, Russell on Ethics , London: Routledge. Ab, Russell on Religion , London: Routledge. A, Russell on Metaphysics , London: Routledge. Rempel and John G. Slater eds. Lewis eds. Moore ed. Rempel, Andrew Brink and Margaret Moran eds.
Rempel ed. What are the three passions of Bertrand Russell? Who wrote in praise of idleness? What means idleness? What does Russell say about the importance of developing a free intellect What is it? What according to you is the basic argument of the essay the praise of idleness? What are the insights of author from the essay in praise of idleness about the ethics of work? What did Bertrand Russell? What is philosophy in your own understanding? Is stoic sense of apathy ethical?
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