Bertrand Russell was well known during his lifetime as a controversial public figure; in retrospect, he has been evaluated primarily as a philosopher and social critic. As a public figure he opposed World War I, supported World War II, headed a campaign for nuclear disarmament (although immediately after World War II he had advocated the nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union to prevent the spread of Stalinist communism), opposed the Vietnam War, served jail sentences, and was involved in lawsuits, love affairs, and marriages that supplied fodder for gossip for at least sixty years of his life. As a philosopher, Russell is seen as both a pioneer and a transitional figure between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trends in Anglo- American thought. He was a pioneer in the development of mathematical logic, an abstract discipline that he applied to theory of knowledge and metaphysics and that influenced a generation and more of philosophers.
