福师《高级英语（二）》第二课拓展资源

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福师《高级英语（二）》第二课拓展资源
The 50s and 60s saw great strides in social welfare in most western countries. The sufferings of the last war had barely been cast behind when men began to concern themselves primarily about more leisure and less labor. To speak about the importance of work in such times seems, to most people, an anachronism. But to Bertrand Russell, who had always been a crusader against parasitic bourgeois ethics, the topic became of renewed importance and immediacy. He saw it as a good opportunity to reaffirm importance and immediacy. He saw it as a good opportunity to reaffirm the essence of the democratic work ethic and to lash out at some of the dehumanizing practices of capitalist exploitation.
Indeed, no one else could have done so from the unique point of view that Bertrand Russell had. He was born into one of Britain’s most aristocratic families. As a boy, he was brought up under the stern tutorage of conservative bourgeois morals. He was given a private education so that he would strike his roots in the soil of conservative tradition. But Russell grew up to become just the opposite of everything his upbringing aimed at. From early on he developed an intense inner life, yearning for liberal ideals. He began to have doubts about religion, which soon grew into a firm belief in atheism. He married, against the sides of his family, an American Quaker girl with advanced political ideas. When he studies economics in Germany, he was introduced to Marxism by the Social Democrats there. He even pledged his support for trial marriage and easier divorce. He did not hesitate to give away the income his aristocratic inheritance provided to various political causes. He earned his own living thereafter by teaching and writing.
During World War I. Russell was fined and imprisoned for his pacifist views and anti-war activities. But this could by no means stop him. Rather it sent him striding ahead in his career as a left-wing social activist. He turned out book after book, expressing liberal views on morals, politics, education and pacifism. All these influential view became a source of illumination and encouragement to the rebellious youth in the 69s, and Russell himself came to be regarded as the champion of individual liberty.
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3d Earl, 1872-1970, British philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer; b. Wales. The grandson of Lord John Russell, the 1st Earl Russell, he succeeded to the earldom in 1931. While teaching at Cambridge Univ. Russell produced his most important works, Principles of Mathematics (1903) and, with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (3 vol., 1910-13), in which he attempted to show how the laws of mathematics could be deduced from the basic axioms of logic. His work influenced 20th-cent. Symbolic logic (see logic), set theory in mathematics, and logical positivism, especially in the work of his student Ludwig Wittgenstein. An undogmatic but zealous rationalist, Russell was deeply convinced of the logical independence of individual facts and the dependence of knowledge on the data of original experience. Well known for his social views, he was an active pacifist during World War I. In 1927 he and his wife founded the highly experimental Beacon Hill School. His liberal views on marriage, sex, adultery, and homosexuality made him controversial during most of the 1930s. He abandoned pacifism during World War II in the face of the Nazi threat, but reverted to it after the war, becoming a leader in the "ban the bomb" movement to halt the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In the 1960s he and Jean-Paul Sartre organized European opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Russell's radicalism kept him from a traditional academic career, and he supported himself chiefly by his writings, many of them widely read, e.g., Marriage and Morals (1929), A History of Western Philosophy (1945), and his autobiography (3 vol., 1967-69). In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
Born in Trelleck, Wales, on May 18, 1872, Russell was educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. After graduation in 1894, he traveled in France, Germany, and the United States and was then made a fellow of Trinity College. From an early age he developed a strong sense of social consciousness; at the same time, he involved himself in the study of logical and mathematical questions, which he had made his special fields and on which he was called to lecture at many institutions throughout the world. He achieved prominence with his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics (1902), in which he attempted to remove mathematics from the realm of abstract philosophical notions and to give it a precise scientific framework.
Russell then collaborated for eight years with the British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead to produce the monumental work Principia Mathematica (3 volumes, 1910-1913). This work showed that mathematics can be stated in terms of the concepts of general logic, such as class and membership in a class. It became a masterpiece of rational thought. Russell and Whitehead proved that numbers can be defined as classes of a certain type, and in the process they developed logic concepts and a logic notation that established symbolic logic as an important specialization within the field of philosophy. In his next major work, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Russell borrowed from the fields of sociology, psychology, physics, and mathematics to refute the tenets of idealism, the dominant philosophical school of the period, which held that all objects and experiences are the product of the intellect. Russell, a realist, believed that objects perceived by the senses have an inherent reality independent of the mind.
Pacifist and Socialist
Russell condemned both sides in World War I (1914-1918), and for his uncompromising stand he was fined, imprisoned, and deprived of his teaching post at Cambridge. In prison he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), combining the two areas of knowledge he regarded as inseparable. After the war he visited the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, and in his book Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) he expressed his disappointment with the form of socialism practiced there. He felt that the methods used to achieve a Communist system were intolerable and that the results obtained were not worth the price paid.
Russell taught at Beijing University in China during 1921 and 1922. From 1928 to 1932, after he returned to England, he conducted the private, highly progressive Beacon Hill School for young children. From 1938 to 1944 he taught at various educational institutions in the United States. He was barred, however, from teaching at the College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York) by the state supreme court because of his attacks on religion in such works as What I Believe (1925) and his advocacy of sexual freedom, expressed in Manners and Morals (1929).
Russell returned to England in 1944 and was reinstated as a fellow of Trinity College. Although he abandoned pacifism to support the Allied cause in World War II (1939-1945), he became an ardent and active opponent of nuclear weapons. In 1949 he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI. Russell received the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature and was cited as "the champion of humanity and freedom of thought." He led a movement in the late 1950s advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament by Great Britain, and at the age of 89 he was imprisoned after an antinuclear demonstration. He died on February 2, 1970.
Philosopher and Author
In addition to his earlier work, Russell also made a major contribution to the development of logical positivism, a strong philosophical movement of the 1930s and 1940s. The major Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, at one time Russell's student at Cambridge, was strongly influenced by his original concept of logical atomism. In his search for the nature and limits of knowledge, Russell was a leader in the revival of the philosophy of empiricism in the larger field of epistemology. In Our Knowledge of the External World (1926) and Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1962), he attempted to explain all factual knowledge as constructed out of immediate experiences. Among his other books are The ABC of Relativity (1925), Education and the Social Order (1932), A History of Western Philosophy (1945), The Impact of Science upon Society (1952), My Philosophical Development (1959), War Crimes in Vietnam (1967), and The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (3 volumes, 1967-1969).
Quotations by Russell
Boredom is . . . a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.Overview
? Two roles of work:
? To prevent boredom
? To provide the possibility to fulfill oneself
? The exercise of skill ·The constructive function of work
The analysis affords Russell an outlet to voice his bitter hatred of war and social violence and his pacifist views concerning social conflict.
He believes that a true writer is obligated to express complex ideas through the plainest common language.
This essay is a fine specimen of what he preaches.
Prevailing throughout the text is an extraordinary lucidity.
Eloquent flow of well-chosen facts; tightly-knit arguments; a plain but forceful diction that lends itself to smooth rhythm; neatness with which the author spins out his fully-developed sentences; an accuracy that is required only by scientific reporting.本内容由奥鹏易百网整理发布
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