Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher, logician and campaigner who co-wrote Principia Mathematica and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, in Monmouthshire. With Alfred North Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes in 1910, 1912 and 1913. The Problems of Philosophy followed in 1912. He encouraged the publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. His opposition to the First World War led to a spell in Brixton Prison in 1918. His lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian", given at Battersea Town Hall on 6 March 1927 for the South London branch of the National Secular Society, was issued as a pamphlet that year. In 1957 Paul Edwards collected it with related essays in a book of the same title. A History of Western Philosophy, which grew out of lectures at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 1941 and 1942, was a commercial success and freed him from money worries in later life. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. His Autobiography appeared in three volumes from 1967 to 1969. He died at Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, on 2 February 1970. His archives are held at McMaster University, Ontario.

For collectors

For A History of Western Philosophy, the first edition is the American one, published by Simon & Schuster in 1945. The first British edition followed from George Allen & Unwin in 1946.