This is the first book to present a carefully chosen and annotated selection of the unpublished writings and correspondence of the English logician John Venn (1834-1923). Today remembered mainly as the inventor of the famous diagram that bears his name, Venn was an important figure of nineteenth-century Cambridge, where he worked alongside leading thinkers, such as Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, on the development of the Moral Sciences Tripos. Venn published three influential textbooks on logic, contributed some dozen articles to the then newly-established journal Mind, of which he became co-editor in 1892, and counted F.W. Maitland, William Cunningham and Arthur Balfour among his pupils. After his active career as a logician, which ended around the turn of the 20th century, Venn reinvented himself as a biographer of his University, College and family. Together with his son, he worked on the massive Alumni Cantabrigienses, which is still usedtoday as a standard reference source.
The material presented here, including the 100-page Annals: Autobiographical Sketch, provides much new information on Venn’s philosophical development and Cambridge in the 1850s-60s. It also brings to light Venn’s relation with famous colleagues and friends, such as Leslie Stephen, Francis Galton, and William Stanley Jevons, thereby placing him at the heart of Victorian intellectual life.
Table of Content
Introduction.- Abbreviations.- Part I Unpublished Writings.- Note to the Reader.- Annals – Autobiographical Sketch.- Science and Common Thought.- Part II Selected Correspondence.- Note to the Reader.- List of Letters.- I. Student: 1853–1857.- II. Curate: 1858–1862.- III. Moral Scientist: 1862–1899.- IV. Looking Back: 1900–1923.- Biographical List of Names.- Acknowledgments and Permissions.- Bibliography.
About the author
After September 2021: Lukas M. Verburgt is currently Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and guest researcher at Leiden University, Institute of Philosophy. He is the author of John Venn: A Life in Logic (forthcoming at The University of Chicago Press) and (co-)editor of several collections, including A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859 (forthcoming at Springer). His main field of expertise is the history of science and philosophy in modern Europe, with a focus on Victorian Britain. Verburgt has held visiting research positions at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
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