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Russell was famously asked what he would do if, upon dying, he discovered that God exists after all. He replied that he would take God to task for not providing sufficient evidence of his existence.

In Russell's opinion the doctrine that sex is sinful has done untold harm. The harm begins in childhood and continues into adulthood in the form of inhibitions and the stresses they cause. By repressing sexual impulses, conventional morality subverts other kinds of friendly feeling also, making people less generous and…

This belief in the possibility of rational resolutions to moral dilemmas often threatened to desert Russell when he contemplated human folly, but he clung to it nevertheless.

Russell was at his best when criticizing contemporary moral and political conditions. The positive alternatives he suggested typically look unpersuasive, tending to be either utopian or, at very least — given the circumstances in which he offered them — impracticable to a degree. But as critic, scourge, and gadfly he is…

The best way to characterize Russell's contribution in the ethical sphere is, perhaps, to say that he was much more a moralist than a moral philosopher. Like Aristotle before him he regarded ethics and politics as continuous; there is no difference of kind between the ethical judgement that war is evil and the political…

By whichever measure one chooses, Russell, who contemplated many universes, is a great mind. He changed the course of philosophy and gave it a new character. There are very few figures in history of whom, with respect to their own sphere of activity, this can be said. And even then, some of these achieved it by accident…

But in philosophy his place is so pivotal that, as remarked in the opening chapter, he is practically its wallpaper. His philosophical inheritors carry on their philosophical work in his style, addressing problems he identified or to which he gave contemporary shape, using tools and techniques he developed, and all in…

If you wish to see Russell's monument, look around you at mainstream philosophy in the English language as it has been practised since the years between the two world wars. Look also at logic, at the philosophy of mathematics, at the changed moral climate of the twentieth-century Western world, and at attempts to halt the…

Many at the time found Russell's views profoundly shocking. Marriage and Morals lost him his job in New York in 1940 (although ten years later, as noted, it earned him a Nobel Prize, which illustrates how unpredictable life can be), and together with his reputation for enjoying female company it led many to attach to him…

Russell was always prepared to take instruction from the science of his day, in this instance looking to biology for an explanation of the origins of custom. It prompted him to think that sexual morality in early times had the biological purpose of securing the protection of two parents for each child, a motive which…

Tact is undoubtedly a virtue, Russell says, but only the thinnest of lines separates it from hypocrisy. The distinction is one of motive. If kindliness prompts us to please another in circumstances where bluntness might cause upset, tact is appropriate; but it is less amiable when the motive is fear of offending, or desire…

Russell's Nobel Prize was awarded to him for literature, and the book cited was Marriage and Morals. Russell wrote much on practical moral questions, some of the best of it to be found in the dozens of short pieces he contributed to newspapers, not least those published by the Hearst Press in America during the early…

The main problem for Russell was how to reconcile two conflicting things: on the one hand, allegiance to profoundly and passionately held moral convictions, and, on the other hand, the apparent groundlessness of moral judgement. His difficulty in achieving this reconciliation was increased by his scepticism about whether…

Russell contributed voluminously to debates about morals, politics, religion, education, and questions of war and peace. He did not think of these contributions as being in the strict sense philosophical. As the preceding chapter shows, he regarded philosophy as a technical discipline concerned with abstract questions…

Crucially, however, there remains a familiar and major problem about whether inferences from perception to the world are secure. A large part of Russell's aim in Human Knowledge (HK) was to state grounds for taking them to be so. Throughout his thinking about the relation of perception and science he was convinced that…

Familiarly by now, the common thread linking Russell's earlier and later views was his desire to reconcile science and perception, with the particular aim of basing the former on the relative certainty of the latter and thus furnishing it with grounds. He saw the chief problem in any such enterprise as securing the move…

Russell had come to think that the best candidate for what is metaphysically most basic in the world is the ‘event’. Objects are constructed out of events in the following way: the world is a collection of events, most of which cluster together around a multitude of ‘centres’, thus constituting individual ‘objects’. Each…

Another reason for Russell's reversion to realism was his recognition that the notion of causality is problematic for phenomenalism. Things in the world seem to affect one another causally in ways that are difficult to account for properly by mere reports of sense-experiences. Moreover, a causal theory of perception is a…

One of the chief reasons for Russell's reversion to a realistic, inferential view about physical things was the difficulty inherent in the notion of unsensed sense-data or, in the later terminology, percepts. As noted above, the idea had been to replace inferred entities with logically constructed ones, an application of…