The goal of this paper is to provide a detailed reading of John Venn's Logic of Chance as a work of logic or, more specifically, as a specific portion of the general system of so-called ‘material’ logic developed in his Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic and to discuss it against the background of his Boolean-inspired views on the connection between logic and mathematics. It is by means of this situating of Venn 1866 [The Logic of Chance. An Essay on (...) the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability. With Especial Reference to Its Application to Moral and Social Science, London: Macmillan] within the entirety of his oeuvre that it becomes both possible to revisit and necessary to re-articulate its place in the history of the frequency interpretation of probability. For it is clear that if Venn's approach to logic not only allowed him to establish its foundations on the basis of a process of idealization and define it as consisting of so-called hypothetical infinite series, bu.. (shrink)

Although the Cambridge Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic James Ward was once one of Britain's most highly regarded Psychologists and Philosophers, today his work is unjustly neglected. This is because his philosophy is frequently misrepresented as a reactionary anti-naturalistic idealist theism. In this article, I argue, first, that this reading is false, and that by viewing Ward through the lens of pragmatism we obtain a fresh interpretation of his work that highlights the scientific nature of his philosophy and his (...) original and promising theory of ‘evolutionary Kantianism’, with its applications to the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics. Second, I show that reading Ward as a pragmatist provides us with (1) a more complex history of the reception of pragmatism at Cambridge at the turn of the twentieth century than the straightforwardly hostile one traditionally told; and (2) a more detailed understanding of the wide range of philosophical problems to which pragmatism was deemed at this time to have an appropriate application. (shrink)

While previous studies of Dewey's work have taken either a historical or topical focus, Shook offers an innovative, organic approach to understanding Dewey and eloquently shows that Dewey's instrumentalism grew seamlessly out of his idealism. He argues that most current scholarship operates under a mistaken impression of Dewey's early philosophical positions.