William Kneale

William C. Kneale ( born June 22, 1906 in Liverpool, † June 24, 1990 in Grassington, Yorkshire, UK) was a British logician, logic, history and economics. He became better known through the co-authored with his wife Martha Kneale history of formal logic The Development of Logic (1962 ), which is still regarded as the standard work in this field.

Life

Kneale in Liverpool visited first the Liverpool Institute, before he was able to study thanks to a scholarship in classical philology at Brasenose College, Oxford. According to its financial statements (1925 & 1927), he spent a semester abroad in Paris and Freiburg, where he heard, among others, Edmund Husserl. After his first jobs as a lecturer in Aberdeen and Newcastle, he was a Fellow of Exeter College 1932, Oxford. Kneale was a close friend of Gilbert Ryle and support him and the linguistic philosopher John Langshaw Austin in their efforts to adjust the philosophy at Oxford. In contrast to the two Kneale but is not considered to be representative of, also known as Oxford Philosophy Philosophy of natural language. In 1938 he married Martha Hurst, the lecturer of Philosophy and Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall was. The children of the two are the statistician George Kneale and philosopher Jane Heal. Martha Hurst Kneale, an expert on ancient philosophy, took over in the joint project The Development of Logic, where both worked about ten years, the chapter on the logic of Greek antiquity. 1960 Kneale successor by JL Austin as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. 1963/4 was Kneale Chairman of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. In 1964 he was chairman of the Kneale Commission, which implemented a comprehensive reorganization of study at Oxford. In 1966 he moved back probably due to illness of the doctrine. 1971 to 1972 he was Vice President of the British Academy, whose Member he had been elected in 1950. Kneale died 1990.

Work

Kneale employed since the 40s of the 20th century with the history of logic, his first work in this area examined the history of the reception of the co-founder of formal logic, George Boole. His first essay on this topic, Boole and the Revival of Logic, published in the journal Mind in 1948. As a philosopher of science itself Kneale also dealt with probability theory and inductive thinking. He also wrote several works on philosophical logic, in particular to the truth theory of natural languages ​​and linguistic treatment of logical paradoxes.

Work on Development of Logic took place in the years 1947 to 1957 in close collaboration with his wife Martha, who wrote the chapter on the logic of Greek antiquity. The work represents the most comprehensive English-language history of logic from the 20th century is, and can only with NI Styazhkin, Formirovanie matematicheskoj logiki be compared to that of 1967. Although Kneale and Kneale cover the entire history of logic, they devote Aristotle and Gottlob Frege relatively large amount of space. The work can therefore be considered as a causal factor for the rediscovery of Frege's thinking in the late 1960s, is regarded as the proponent Michael Dummett, whose colleagues were the Kneales in Oxford.

Besides the two monographs Development of Logic and Propabilty and Induction Kneale wrote over forty contributions to metaphysics, philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science to epistemology and philosophical logic. Of greater influence was especially The Province of Logic, a fairly short article, which appeared in 1956 in a band, which should show the contemporary British philosophy in self-presentations. In this article Kneale generalized the idea of ​​the rules of inference of a relationship between sets to an abstract inferential relationships between flow rates, similar to a Gentzen calculus.

Publications

A selection of Kneales main publications:

• Boole and the revival of logic, in: Mind ( ns) 57, 149-175, 1948.
• Probability and Induction, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1949, reprinted 1952.1963.
• Boole and the algebra of logic, in: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London from 12.53 to 63, 1956.
• The province of logic, in H. D. Lewis (editor), Contemporary British Philosophy, Third series ( London, Allen & Unwin, New York, Humanities Press ), 235-261, 1956.
• Gottlob Frege and mathematical logic, in AJ Ayer, et. al., The Revolution in Philosophy (London, Macmillan ), 26-40, 1956.
• With Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962. ² 1984, ISBN 0-19-824773-7, Google book preview page dt: history of logic from its beginnings in ancient Greece to the philosophical developments of logic and mathematics by Gottlob Frege ( 1848-1925 ). With the Select Bibliography & register. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978.