Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) tried to reduce all mathematics to symbolic logic. He believed that symbolic logic was an "ideal language" which could be purified of confusions and show the basic character of reality. He suspected that all philosophical problems originated in obscure and sloppy language (such as that of Hegel). Russell himself wrote in a clear and entertaining style on the whole range of contemporary problems from sexual morality to relativity theory. He was jailed twice for his pacifist demonstrations, and he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize for literature.

The topics we shall discuss... all reduce themselves, insofar as they are genuinely philosophical, to problems of logic. This is not due to any accident, but to the fact that every philosophical problem. when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all. or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.
- Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914)