19th Century British Philosophy S.
1 total work
This collection of Jevons' papers falls naturally into two groups. There are papers developing Jevons' positive conception of logic as a purely abstract, formal discipline; and there is a group of papers from the "Contemporary Review", written in criticism of Mill, in which Jevons reveals himself as one of the intellectual ancestors of the computer revolution. Logic, Jevons insists, involves only the form of thought and not the content; it is a matter of mechanical rules capable, in principle, of being followed by a machine. The second group, published under the general heading "J.S. Mill's Philosophy Tested", consists of articles on geometrical reasoning, resemblance, experimental methods and utilitarianism. According to Jevons, Mill's mind was "essentially illogical" and his famous "Logic" is a mere jumble of logic, epistemology, and psychology, utterly lacking in the rigour and formal elegance that characterize pure logic. It was Jevons' conception of logic, needless to say, and not Mill's that has become the orthodoxy of our own age.