Skip to main content
  • Pricing
  • Policies
  • Support us
  • Login
Sign up
  1. Home
  2. Augustus De Morgan, Polymath
  3. 5. Augustus De Morgan: Meta-Scientific Rebel
Open Book Publishers

5. Augustus De Morgan: Meta-Scientific Rebel

  • Lukas Verburgt(author)
Chapter of: Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy(pp. 106–150)
  • Export Metadata
  • Metadata
  • Locations
  • Contributors
  • References

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
    • ProQuest Ebrary
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
Title5. Augustus De Morgan
SubtitleMeta-Scientific Rebel
ContributorLukas Verburgt(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0408.05
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0408/chapters/10.11647/obp.0408.05
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightLukas Verburgt
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-09-04
Long abstractAugustus De Morgan’s work on mathematics and logic in the mid-nineteenth century is familiar to historians of both disciplines. What is less known is his work on scientific method, where he went against the grain of the dominant English view of knowledge, embodied most prominently by his former teacher William Whewell. De Morgan argued that in so far as induction rests upon probability, mathematics rather than observation is the motor of scientific progress. Drawing on De Morgan’s published work as well as on unpublished sources, such as his correspondence with Whewell, this chapter examines De Morgan’s meta-scientific views. What emerges is a rounded picture of De Morgan as a pioneer of a new probabilistic image of human knowledge that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy.
Page rangepp. 106–150
Print length45 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Locations
Landing PageFull text URLPlatform
PDFhttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0408/chapters/10.11647/obp.0408.05Landing pagehttps://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0408.05.pdfFull text URL
HTMLhttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0408/chapters/10.11647/obp.0408.05Landing pagehttps://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0408/ch5.xhtmlFull text URLPublisher Website
Contributors

Lukas Verburgt

(author)
Research and Project Associate at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6007-1324

Lukas M. Verburgt is currently an independent scholar based in the Netherlands. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held visiting research positions at Leiden University, Trinity College, Cambridge, the Department for the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Verburgt has published widely on the history of philosophy, science and mathematics in Victorian Britain and is (co-)editor of A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859 (Springer, 2022) as well as the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to John Herschel and Cambridge Companion to Charles Babbage.

References
  1. Alborn, Timothy L., ‘The Business of Induction: Industry and Genius in the Language of British Scientific Reform, 1820–1840’, History of Science, 34:1 (1996), 91–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327539603400104
  2. Ashworth, William J., ‘The Calculating Eye: Baily, Herschel, Babbage and the Business of Astronomy’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 27:4 (1994), 409–41. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007087400032428
  3. ―, ‘Memory, Efficiency, and Symbolic Analysis. Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and the Industrial Mind’, Isis, 87:4 (1996), 629–53. https://doi.org/10.1086/357650
  4. ―, The Trinity Circle: Anxiety, Intelligence and Knowledge Creation in Nineteenth-Century England (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). https://doi.org/10.2307/ j.ctv1tgx06p
  5. Bellone, Enrico, A World on Paper: Studies on the Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980 [1976]).
  6. Boole, George, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Walton & Maberly, 1854).
  7. Brewster, David, ‘On the History of the Inductive Sciences’, Edinburgh Review, 66 (1837), 110–51.
  8. Burke, Peter, The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020). https://doi.org/10.12987/ 9780300252088
  9. Butts, Robert E., ed., William Whewell’s Theory of Scientific Method (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968).
  10. Cahan, David, ed., From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth Century Science (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).
  11. Cannon, W.F., ‘Scientists and Broad Churchmen: An Early Victorian Intellectual Network’, Journal of British Studies, 4:1 (1964), 65–88.
  12. Cobb, Aaron D., ‘Is John F.W. Herschel an Inductivist about Hypothetical Inquiry?’ Perspectives on Science, 20:4 (2012), 409–39. https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00080
  13. Cohen, L. Jonathan, ‘Some Historical Remarks on the Baconian Conception of Probability’, in L. Jonathan Cohen, Knowledge and Language (Cham: Springer, 1980), pp. 245–59.
  14. Cowles, Henry, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). https://doi.org/10.4159/ 9780674246843
  15. Daston, Lorraine, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
  16. De Morgan, Augustus. ‘History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Times. By W. Whewell’, The Athenæum, 541, 10 March 1838, pp. 179–81.
  17. ―, First Notions of Logic (Preparatory to the Study of Geometry), 2nd edn (London: Taylor & Walton, 1840).
  18. ―, Formal Logic: Or, The Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable (London: Taylor and Walton, 1847).
  19. ―, ‘The Progress of the Doctrine of the Earth’s Motion between the Times of Copernicus and Galileo, Being Notes on the Ante-Galilean Copernicans’, Companion to the Almanac for 1855, 5–25.
  20. ―, ‘The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. By W. Whewell’, The Athenæum, 672, 12 September 1840, pp. 707–09.
  21. ―, ‘The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by James Spedding, R. Leslie Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath. 5 vols.’, The Athenæum, 1612, 18 September 1858, pp. 367–68.
  22. [―], Review of William Whewell’s Novum Organum Renovatum, The Athenæum, 1628 (8 January 1859), 42–44.
  23. [―], Review of William Whewell’s The Philosophy of Discovery, The Athenæum, 1694 (14 April 1860), 501–03.
  24. ―, ‘Logic (1860)’, in On the Syllogism and Other Logical Writings by Augustus De Morgan, ed. by Peter Heath (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1966, pp. 247–66.
  25. Despeaux, Sloan Evans, and Adrian C. Rice, ‘Augustus De Morgan’s Anonymous Reviews for The Athenæum: A Mirror of a Victorian Mathematician’, Historia Mathematica, 43:2 (2016), 148–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2015.09.001
  26. Dongen, Jeroen van, and Herman Paul, eds, Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities (Cham: Springer, 2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48893-6
  27. Ducheyne, Steffen, ‘Whewell’s Philosophy of Science’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by W.J. Mander (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 71–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199594474.013.011
  28. ―, ‘Kant and Whewell on Bridging Principles between Metaphysics and Science’, Kant-Studien, 102:1 (2012), 22–45. https://doi.org/10.1515/kant.2011.002
  29. Ellis, Robert Leslie, ‘On the Foundations of the Theory of Probabilities’, Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 8 (1844), 1–6.
  30. ―, ‘Remarks on an Alleged Proof of the Method of Least Squares’, Philosophical Magazine, 37 (November 1850), 321–28.
  31. Enros, P.C., ‘The Analytical Society (1812–13): Precursor of the Renewal of Cambridge Mathematics’, Historia Mathematica, 10:1 (1983), 24–47.
  32. Fitzpatrick, William John, Memoirs of Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin. Volume I (London: Richard Bentley, 1864).
  33. Gillispie, Charles, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
  34. Hamilton, William, ‘IV. – Logic. In Reference to the Recent English Treatises on that Science’, in Sir William Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform. Chiefly from the Edinburgh Review; Corrected, Vindicated, Enlarged, in Notes and Appendices. 2nd edn (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853), pp. 118–75.
  35. Heis, Jeremy, ‘Attempts to Rethink Logic’, in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), ed. by A.W. Wood and S.S. Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 95–132. https://doi.org/10.1017/ cho9780511975257.008
  36. Herschel, John F.W., A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, and John Taylor, 1830).
  37. ―, ‘Review of the History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences’, Quarterly Review, 135 (June 1841), 96–130.
  38. Hobart, Michael E., and Joan L. Richards, ‘De Morgan’s Logic’, in Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 4: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2008), pp. 283–330. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1874-5857(08)80010-6
  39. Jongsma, Calvin, ‘Richard Whately’s Revitalization of Syllogistic Logic’, in Aristotle’s Syllogism and the Creation of Modern Logic: Between Tradition and Innovation, 1820–1930, ed. by Lukas M. Verburgt and Matteo Cosci (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).
  40. Laudan, Larry, ‘Theories of Scientific Method from Plato to Mach: A Bibliographic Review’, History of Science, 7:1 (1968), 1–63.
  41. ―, ‘William Whewell on the Consilience of Inductions’, The Monist, 55 (1971), 368–91.
  42. ―, ‘Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological Thought’, in The Methodological Heritage of Newton, ed. by Robert E. Butts and John W. Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 103–31. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442632783-007
  43. ―, ‘Induction and Probability in the Nineteenth Century’, in Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IV. Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Bucharest, 1971, ed. by Patrick Suppes et al. (Amsterdam & London: North-Holland, 1973), pp. 429–38.
  44. Maas, Harro, ‘“A Hard Battle to Fight”: Natural Theology and the Dismal Science, 1820–50’, History of Political Economy, 40:5 (2008), 143–67. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-2007-064
  45. Merrill, Daniel D., Augustus De Morgan and the Logic of Relations (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2047-7
  46. Mill, John Stuart, ‘Review of Whately’s Elements of Logic’, in J.M. Robson, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Volume XI: Essays on Philosophy and the Classics (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978), pp. 3–35.
  47. Olson, Richard S., Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 1740–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
  48. Oslington, Paul, ‘Natural Theology, Theodicy, and Political Economy in Nineteenth-century Britain: William Whewell’s Struggle’, History of Political Economy, 49:4 (2017), 575–606.
  49. Panteki, Maria, ‘French “Logique” and British “Logic”: On the Origins of Augustus De Morgan’s Early Logical Inquiries, 1805–1835’, in Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 4: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2008), pp. 381–457. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1874-5857(08)80012-x
  50. Rice, Adrian, ‘Augustus De Morgan: Historian of Science’, History of Science, 34:2 (1996), 201–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327539603400203
  51. ―, ‘’Everybody Makes Errors’: The Intersection of De Morgan’s Logic and Probability, 1837–1847’, History and Philosophy of Logic, 24:4 (2003), 289–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340310001599579
  52. Rice, Adrian, and Eugene Seneta, ‘De Morgan in the Prehistory of Statistical Hypothesis Testing’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 168:3 (2005), 615–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-985x.2005.00367.x
  53. Richards, Joan L., ‘“In a Rational World All Radicals Would be Exterminated”: Mathematics, Logic and Secular Thinking in Augustus De Morgan’s England’, Science in Context, 15:1 (2002), 137–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/s026988970200039x
  54. ―, ‘The Probable and the Possible in Early Victorian England’, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 51–71.
  55. ―, Generations of Reason: A Family’s Search for Meaning in Post-Newtonian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300255492. 001.0001
  56. Scarre, Geoffrey, Logic and Reality in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).
  57. Schaffer, Simon, ‘Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. by Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 82–98.
  58. ―, ‘Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy’, Social Studies of Science, 16:3 (1986), 387–420.
  59. Secord, James A., Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/ 9780226203317.001.0001
  60. Sgarbi, Marco, and Matteo Cosci, eds, The Aftermath of Syllogism: Aristotelian Logical Argument from Avicenna to Hegel (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350043558
  61. Shortland, Michael, and Richard Yeo, ‘Introduction’, in Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1017/ cbo9780511525292.002
  62. Smith, Crosbie, and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
  63. Smith, Jonathan, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).
  64. Snyder, Laura J., Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). https://doi.org/10.7208/ chicago/9780226767352.001.0001
  65. ―, ‘“The Whole Box of Tools”: William Whewell and the Logic of Induction’, in Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 4: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2008), pp. 163–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1874-5857(08)80008-8
  66. ―, ‘Hypotheses in 19th Century British Philosophy of Science: Herschel, Whewell, Mill’, in The Significance of the Hypothetical in Natural Science, ed. by Michael Heidelberger and Gregor Schiemann (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110210620.59
  67. ―, The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World (New York: Broadway Books, 2011). https://doi.org/10.5479/ sil.1026689.39088017816588
  68. Strong, John V., ‘The Infinite Ballot Box of Nature: De Morgan, Boole, and Jevons on Probability and the Logic of Induction’, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1976:1 (1976), 197–211.
  69. Todhunter, Isaac, William Whewell D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. An Account of His Writings. With Selections from His Literary and Scientific Correspondence, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1876).
  70. Van Evra, James, ‘Richard Whately and Logical Theory’, in Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 4: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2008), pp. 75–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1874-5857(08)80006-4
  71. Venn, John, ‘Consistency and Real Inference’, Mind, 1:1 (1876), 43–52.
  72. Verburgt, Lukas M., ‘Robert Leslie Ellis’s Work on Philosophy of Science and the Foundations of Probability Theory’, Historia Mathematica, 40:4 (2013), 423–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2013.07.003
  73. ―, ed., A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817–1859 (New York: Springer, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85258-0
  74. Wettersten, John, Whewell’s Critics: Have They Prevented Him from Doing Good? (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005). https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004359246
  75. Whately, Richard, ed., Bacon’s Essays: With Annotations (London, 1856).
  76. ―, Elements of Logic. 2nd edn (London, 1827).
  77. ―, Elements of Logic. 9th edn(London, 1848).
  78. Whewell, William, Astronomy and General Physics, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London: William Pickering, 1833).
  79. [―], ‘Modern Science – Inductive Philosophy Review of John F.W. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy’, Quarterly Review, 45 (July 1831), 374–407.
  80. ―, ‘Remarks on Mathematical Reasoning and on the Logic of Induction’, in The Mechanical Euclid. 3rd edn(London, 1838).
  81. ―, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History, vol. 2 (London: John W. Parker, 1840).
  82. ―, ‘Criticism of Aristotle’s Account of Induction’, Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 10.1 (1850), 63–72.
  83. ―, History of Scientific Ideas, vol. 1 (London: John W. Parker, 1858).
  84. ―, Novum Organon Renovatum (London: John W. Parker, 1858).
  85. ―, On the Philosophy of Discovery: Chapters Historical and Critical (London: John W. Parker, 1860).
  86. Yeo, Richard, ‘Scientific Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain’, in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method. Histories Studies, ed. by John A. Schuster and Richard Yeo (Dordrecht & Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986), pp. 259–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4560-9_8
  87. ―, ‘An Idol of the Market-place: Baconianism in Nineteenth Century Britain’, History of Science, 23:3 (1985), 251–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327538502300302
  88. ―, ‘Genius, Method, and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760–1860’, Science in Context, 2:2 (1988), 257–84. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700000594
  89. ―, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). https://doi.org/ 10.1017/cbo9780511521515

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
    • ProQuest Ebrary
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters

UK registered social enterprise and Community Interest Company (CIC).

Company registration 14549556

Metadata

  • By book
  • By publisher
  • GraphQL API
  • Export API

Thoth

  • About Us
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Service status

Contact

  • Email
  • Twitter
  • Mastodon
  • Github

Copyright © 2025 Thoth Open Metadata. Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.