Famous Thinkers
Catalina Britton
PHL458
May 12, 2014
Charles Crenshaw

Famous Thinkers Bertrand Russell was a “British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, social critic and political activist (Roberts, 2013).” He also was a self proclaimed liberal, pacifist, and socialist. However, he did admit he had never been any of the previous, with any profound impact. During the 20 century, Russell was preeminent in the founding of analytic philosophy and is touted as a premier logician of his time. Russell exuded great influence over “logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics(Roberts, 2013).” Among all these accomplishments, Russell was also an anti war activist who spent time in prison for his pacifism during WWI and stood against Hitler in WWII as well as criticizing totalitarianism of the Stalinist movement. He was very out spoken about the US involvement in the Vietnam War and a fierce proponent of nuclear disarmament. Russell received the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1950’s for his significant contributions in the areas of “humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought (Roberts, 2013).” During his life time Russell was very politically active as evidenced by his 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto which addressed Nuclear disarmament and was signed by many of the prominent physicist and intellectuals of the era. Russell was an activist for the Suez Canal crisis. He encouraged peace between Russia and the US during the time of Eisenhower. Russell was outspoken about recognizing of the People’s Republic of China and securing a seat on the UN Security Council for that nation. As was aforementioned, He was very outspoken regarding the US involvement in the Vietnam War and also addressed