Bertrand Russell 羅素 · Bertrand Arthur William Russell

🔊He was taught at home and was often lonely. At eleven his brother began to teach him Euclid, and he later called it one of the great events of his life. He had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. He was also disappointed, because the axioms had to be accepted without proof, and his brother told him that if he did not accept them they could not go on. The wish to find out whether anything could be known for certain, which he traced to that lesson, governed the first half of his working life.

他在家裡受教育，常常很孤單。十一歲時，哥哥開始教他歐幾里得；他後來說，那是他一生中的大事之一。他沒有想像過世上會有這麼美妙的東西。他同時也很失望，因為公理必須不經證明就接受；而哥哥告訴他，如果他不接受，他們就沒辦法繼續下去。「想查明有沒有任何東西是能確定地被知道的」這個願望，他追溯到那一堂課；而它主宰了他工作生涯的前半。

🔊At Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied mathematics and then philosophy. In 1900 he met the Italian logician Giuseppe Peano at a congress in Paris and saw that the new symbolic logic was the tool he needed. Within a year he had drafted most of The Principles of Mathematics, which argued that the whole of mathematics follows from a small number of logical principles. In the spring of 1901 he found the contradiction now called Russell’s paradox, and the next decade went to repairing the damage. He and his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica, three volumes of symbols published between 1910 and 1913. The publisher expected a loss, and the authors paid part of the cost. Russell said that his intellect never quite recovered from the strain.

在劍橋的三一學院，他先讀數學，再讀哲學。1900 年，他在巴黎的一場會議上遇見了義大利邏輯學家朱塞佩・皮亞諾，看出新的符號邏輯正是他需要的工具。不到一年，他就寫出了《數學的原理》的大部分草稿；這本書主張，整個數學都可以從少數幾條邏輯原則推出來。1901 年春天，他發現了現在稱為「羅素悖論」的那個矛盾；接下來的十年，都用在修補損害上。他與從前的老師阿弗烈・諾斯・懷海德合寫了《數學原理》：三大卷的符號，在 1910 到 1913 年間出版。出版社預期會虧本；兩位作者自己負擔了一部分費用。羅素說，他的智力從那番勞累之後，就再也沒有完全恢復。

🔊In the same years he changed the way philosophy was done in English. His paper “On Denoting” of 1905 showed that the grammar of a sentence can hide its logical form, and that puzzles which had seemed deep could be dissolved by rewriting the sentence. From 1911 he taught Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose criticism of his work was so severe that Russell abandoned a book he was writing. He told a friend that he could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.

在同一段時間裡，他改變了英語世界做哲學的方式。他 1905 年的論文〈論指稱〉顯示：一個句子的文法可能遮住了它的邏輯形式；而一些看起來很深的難題，只要把句子改寫，就可以消解掉。從 1911 年起，他教路德維希・維根斯坦；維根斯坦對他的著作批評得極其嚴厲，以致羅素放棄了一本正在寫的書。他告訴一位朋友，他不能指望自己還能再做哲學上根本的工作了。

🔊The First World War turned him into a campaigner. He opposed British entry into the war and worked for the conscientious objectors. In 1916 he was fined, and Trinity dismissed him from his lectureship. In 1918 he was sentenced to six months in Brixton Prison for an article, and he used the time to write his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. In 1920 he went to Russia, met Lenin, and came back an opponent of the Bolsheviks at a time when most of his friends on the left admired them. He then spent most of a year lecturing in Peking, where he fell so ill with pneumonia that a Japanese newspaper reported his death.

第一次世界大戰把他變成了一位運動者。他反對英國參戰，並且為那些出於良心而拒服兵役的人奔走。1916 年他被罰款，三一學院解除了他的講師職位。1918 年，他因為一篇文章被判在布里克斯頓監獄服刑六個月；他利用那段時間寫了《數理哲學導論》。1920 年他到了俄國，見了列寧；回來之後成了布爾什維克的反對者，而那時他在左派的朋友大多仰慕他們。接著，他在北京講學了將近一年；在那裡他得了肺炎，病重到有一家日本報紙報導了他的死訊。

🔊He lived for another forty-nine years. He supported himself by writing books for the general reader on marriage, education, happiness, power, and the history of philosophy, and with his second wife he ran an experimental school. He married four times. In 1940 a New York court canceled his appointment at City College on the ground that he was morally unfit to teach. Ten years later he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1955 he and Einstein issued a manifesto against nuclear weapons, signed by Einstein a few days before his death. In 1961, at eighty-nine, Russell was sent to Brixton again, for a week, after a sit-down protest in London. He died of influenza in Wales in 1970.

他又活了四十九年。他靠著為一般讀者寫書來維生，談婚姻、教育、幸福、權力與哲學史；他還與第二任妻子辦了一所實驗學校。他結了四次婚。1940 年，紐約的一個法院撤銷了他在市立學院的任命，理由是他在道德上不適合教書。十年之後，他獲得了諾貝爾文學獎。1955 年，他與愛因斯坦發表了一份反對核武的宣言；愛因斯坦在去世前幾天簽了字。1961 年，八十九歲的羅素在倫敦的一場靜坐抗議之後，再度被送進布里克斯頓監獄，關了一個星期。1970 年，他因流感在威爾斯去世。