The Logos Scripture · The Book of Russell
The Book of Russell 4 · Written by himself, from his lectures, essays, prison writing and autobiography
Bertrand Russell, born at Trellech in Wales in 1872, died in Wales in 1970 at ninety-seven. Both his parents were dead before he was four, and his grandmother raised him. With Whitehead he wrote the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, meaning to set arithmetic on logic. In 1901 he found a contradiction in his own scheme and wrote to Frege about it; Frege, whose life’s work was then at the printer, added a paragraph at the end saying the foundation of his book had been shaken. In 1916 he was fined for defending a conscientious objector and Cambridge dismissed him; in 1918 an article put him in prison for six months, where he finished a book on the philosophy of mathematics. In 1940 the City College of New York appointed him and a court revoked the appointment on the ground of his views on morals. He took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. In 1955 he and Einstein signed the manifesto urging the nations to give up such weapons (cf. The Book of Einstein). In 1961, at eighty-nine, he went to prison for a week for inciting civil disobedience. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He did not believe and did not hide it: the lecture he gave in 1927 is called Why I Am Not a Christian. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: a man taking back in public what he had said, and showing the working of the retraction (chapter three). There are men here who changed (cf. The Book of Franklin), but none who ran the same reason twice and got two different answers.