Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and political campaigner, was probably the most famous British philosopher of the century. His many honors the Nobel Prize for Literature (1949).

The second son of Viscount Amberley, Russell was born in Monmouthshire, England and orphaned at the age of three. He was brought up by his grandmother, the widow of the former prime minister, Lord John Russell and educated privately until he went to Cambridge. Here he was a pupil of A. N. Whitehead, and won a prize fellowship at Trinity with a thesis on the foundations of geometry. He continued to work on the foundations of mathematics and in 1903 published his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics. In the course of this work Russell encountered a number of problems, all dealing in some ways with very large classes, which he found impossible to resolve. Clearly a deeper study of the foundations of mathematics was called for and eventually led Russell to his central insight that “mathematics and logic are identical”. To demonstrate the truth of such a statement Russell joined with his former tutor, Whitehead, in an in depth study of

Russell's efforts to secure an academic career in the United States were thwarted by conservative opponents who drew attention to his unconventional opinions regarding sexual morality and organized religion. In the notorious lecture entitled "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) Russell pointed out the inadequacy of traditional efforts to demonstrate existence of god, offered a balanced evaluation of the teachings of Jesus, and devalued the harmful moral and social consequences of adherence to Christian religion. Agnosticism was no more popular in America than divorce, and Russell's uncompromising honesty about these issues contributed greatly to his public reputation.

More generally, Russell's lectures on Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and Logical Atomism (1918) offered a in depth view of reality and our knowledge of it. As an empiricist, Russell assumed that all human knowledge must begin with sensory experience. Senses provide the basic content of our experience, and for Russell these senses are not merely mental events, but rather the physical effects caused in us by external objects. Although each happens immediately within the private space of an individual person, he argued, classes of similar senses in various peoples constitute a public space from which even unperceived senses may be occuring. Thus, the contents of sensory experience are both public and objective.

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