Bertrand Russell

1872-1970 · British · Logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, social criticism

I do not think that there is any evidence at all that there is a God.

He was born into the Whig aristocracy — his grandfather had been Prime Minister twice, John Stuart Mill was his secular godfather — orphaned by four, and raised by a grandmother who set him a Bible verse each year. At eleven his brother taught him Euclid, and he later said it was as dazzling as first love, spoiled only by having to accept the axioms without proof. That combination is the whole man: the demand for certainty, and the discovery that it is not available.

Topics Bertrand Russell addresses

• the theory of descriptions
• logical atomism
• the present King of France
• Russell's paradox
• the theory of types
• logicism
• knowledge by acquaintance and by description
• sense-data
• neutral monism
• the problem of induction
• the first-cause argument and its refutation
• the argument from design
• the moral argument for deity
• the character of Christ
• religion as based on fear
• free thought
• the ethics of belief
• the will to doubt
• a free man's worship
• the emotive theory of value
• the value of philosophy
• pacifism and its limits
• conscientious objection
• marriage and morals

Converse with Bertrand Russell on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Bertrand Russell's own writing, cited to the page.