Russell - A Very Short Indroduction Read Online Free PDF Page B

clustered round him.
    Travelling and lecturing, as always with Russell, turned into books. The Reith Lectures appeared as Authority and the Individual . In 1954 he published Human Society in Ethics and Politics , which included his Nobel Prize oration. Because his Nobel Prize was for Literature (the citation nominated Marriage and Morals ) Russell was prompted to write fiction. In 1912 he had written a novel but not attempted to publish it; now he wrote two collections of short stories, more accurately fables, all with philosophical or polemical intent, called Satan in the Suburbs and Nightmares of Eminent Persons . In 1956 he published Portraits From Memory , a series of sketches of eminent people he had known, and in 1959 he gave the world his intellectual autobiography, My Philosophical Development , which summarizes the progress of his views from childhood onwards.
    But any idea that Russell had finally entered the Establishment fold, and would subside into grandly respectable and quiescent old age, was mistaken; for Russell saw that the world was beset by a horrifying and rapidly growing danger which he felt it imperative to resist. This was the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. From the mid-1950s until his death in February 1970 he campaigned against weapons and war with the passion of a young man, among other things earning another prison sentence – commuted, in the light of his great age (he was by then in his nineties), to a week in a prison hospital – and in his very last years again earning dislike and hostility, especially for what seemed to be intemperate, ill-judged, and even hysterical opposition to American actions in the Vietnam War. It later transpired that his accusations of war crimes against the United States were based on largely correct information. In the course of these endeavours Russell became the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), published two books – Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare and Has Man A Future? – and was instrumental in establishing the Pugwash Conference and later, with Jean-Paul Sartre, the International War Crimes Tribunal in opposition to the Vietnam War.
    The political struggles of Russell’s last 15 years are canvassed in chapter 4 below. By the close of his life, despite bodily age and some infirmity (but he was spry and alert until the end, dying in his 98th year) Russell seemed to have grown younger with time; his grandmother sent him into the world a middle-aged Victorian, and he metamorphosed into an eternally young knight-errant; honest, indomitable, equipped with a formidable intellect and great ability as a writer, who used his gifts – not least among them his extraordinarily incisive powers of reason and wit – to do battle with dragons.
    The perspective of time either enlarges or diminishes those who have occupied the public view. Most dwindle into foothills (which is to say, footnotes); a few rise to Himalayan majesty. Among their peaks Russell stands high.

Chapter 2 Logic and philosophy
    Introduction
    By his own account, Russell’s chief philosophical motive was to find out if anything can be known with certainty. This ambition, identical to that of Descartes, had risen in him as a result of two early intellectual crises: his loss of religious faith, and his disappointment at having to accept unproven axioms as the basis of geometry. His first truly original philosophical endeavour was to show that mathematics rests on logic. Success in this enterprise would have provided a grounding of certainty for mathematical knowledge. The project failed, but a number of important philosophical advances came out of the attempt. Russell then turned to the problems of general philosophy, where certainty is even harder to find. He worked at constructing theories which he hoped would, despite the elusiveness of certainty, provide satisfactory solutions nevertheless. He returned to these problems again and again, developing and