Russell

Abstract

Bertrand Russell’s role in the philosophical education of Bloomsbury was, like Dickinson’s, Moore’s and even McTaggart’s, both personal and intellectual. Like theirs, his influence on the Group began with the Apostles. Personally, Russell meant less to Bloomsbury than Dickinson or Moore, yet as a personality he became the most famous of the Apostles. This fame easily leads to misinterpretations that overemphasise his personal involvement with Bloomsbury and underestimate his intellectual significance for them. The variety and complexity, not to mention longevity, of his thinking were unequalled by anyone of his time. Russell’s impact on Bloomsbury extends far beyond the Cambridge years, when he and Moore made their philosophical revolution, to the Great War when Bloomsbury strongly supported Russell’s crusading pacifism, and on into the 1920s and 1930s when Russell’s social, historical and popular philosophical writings were more appealing than the work in logic and epistemology that they had originally found so interesting.