In 1921, Bertrand Russell read his own obituary in Japan after a severe bout of pneumonia, and his partner Dora Black handed sarcastic flyers to journalists explaining that the dead man was unavailable for interviews. It is a fitting introduction to a figure who lived from 1872 to 1970, from the era of horse-drawn carriages to the Vietnam War. This deep dive traces how a lonely aristocratic orphan raised by his Presbyterian grandmother found emotional stability in Euclid's geometry at age 11, applied that mathematical demand for proof to religion and discarded it, and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to dismantle British idealism and help found analytic philosophy.

The episode follows Russell through the grueling decade-long Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, the 1901 semi-mystical awakening that flooded him with emp ...