Explore
Compare
Life
He argued that no sharp line separates truths we can verify by pure logic from truths we verify by checking the world: a distinction philosophy had leaned on for centuries, and that he showed does not really hold.
He spent the first half of his career inventing analytic philosophy and the second half annoying governments. Both projects lasted.
Connection
Bertrand Russell logicism absorbed and questioned W.V.O. Quine — Quine was trained in and initially worked within the logicist program Russell and Whitehead had built in Principia Mathematica, before his mature work turned a skeptical eye on some of the very distinctions that program depended on.
Ideas
Words
“To be is to be the value of a variable.”
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs... is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.”
“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”
Key Moments
1951
Publishes 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'
1960
Publishes Word and Object
1910-13
Principia Mathematica with Whitehead
1918
Imprisoned for anti-war activism
July 1955
Russell-Einstein Manifesto for nuclear disarmament
Works
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
The Problems of Philosophy