Hugh MacColl

Hugh MacColl (before April 1885 spelled as Hugh McColl; 1831–1909) was a Scottish mathematician, logician and novelist. MacColl was the youngest son of a poor Highland family that was at least partly Gaelic-speaking. Hugh's father died when he was still an infant, and Hugh was educated largely thanks to the efforts of his elder brother Malcolm MacColl, an Episcopalian clergyman and friend and political ally of William Ewart Gladstone. Early in his acquaintanceship with Gladstone, Malcolm MacColl persuaded the Liberal politician to provide funds for Hugh's education at Oxford. It was proposed to send him to Oxford University's St. Edmund Hall, but Gladstone made this conditional on Hugh MacColl agreeing to take orders in the Church of England. Hugh MacColl refused this condition and, as a result, never obtained a university education, which may have limited his contribution to philosophy, and certainly prevented him from ever obtaining a formal academic position. After a few years working in different areas of Great Britain, MacColl relocated to Boulogne-sur-Mer, in France on the Channel, where he developed the greater part of his work and became a French citizen. MacColl was not obscure during his time. He was a lifelong regular contributor to the Educational Times. His correspondents included the logicians William Stanley Jevons and Charles Sanders Peirce. He also corresponded, and argued in print, with the young Bertrand Russell, and reviewed Alfred North Whitehead's 1898 Universal Algebra for Mind magazine. MacColl is known for three main accomplishments in formal and philosophical logic: During 1877–1879, while working out a problem involving integration, he published a four-part article establishing the first known variant of the propositional calculus, terming it the "calculus of equivalent statements", preceding Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift. He subsequently published 11 articles in Mind magazine, during the period 1880–1908, and a text, in an effort to attract the attention of philosophers to his work.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (2)

Logic

Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It studies how conclusions follow from premises due to the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. It examines arguments expressed in natural language while formal logic uses formal language.

Classical logic

Classical logic (or standard logic or Frege-Russell logic) is the intensively studied and most widely used class of deductive logic. Classical logic has had much influence on analytic philosophy. Each logical system in this class shares characteristic properties: Law of excluded middle and double negation elimination Law of noncontradiction, and the principle of explosion Monotonicity of entailment and idempotency of entailment Commutativity of conjunction De Morgan duality: every logical operator is dual to another While not entailed by the preceding conditions, contemporary discussions of classical logic normally only include propositional and first-order logics.