Handbook of the History of Logic: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century is widely and rightly held to be the century in which the mathematical revolution in logic achieved its breakthrough. W.V. Quine once remarked that logic is an ancient discipline, but since 1879 it has been a great one. Of course, 1879 marks the publication of Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift, and 1870 and 1883 the appearance of Charles Peirce’s “Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives” and “Note B: The Logic of Relatives”. Frege and Peirce are the independent co-founders of modern quantification theory. Frege (1848–1925) was a German and Peirce (1839–1914) an American (their contributions are chronicled in volume three of this Handbook, The Rise of Mathematical Logic: Leibniz to Frege). Although Frege’s work was little recognized and little appreciated by British logicians of the period — Russell was a late exception — important steps toward the mathematicization of logic were taken in Britain. Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) made significant contributions to the logic of relatives, of which Peirce took respectful heed, and also to probability theory, an interest in which he did much to revive...