Hugh MacColl

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Hugh MacColl (1837-1909) was a Scot who trained as a mathematician and evolved into a logician. MacColl was the youngest son of a poor highland family which was at least in part Gaelic-speaking. Hugh's father died when he was still an infant and it is largely thanks to the efforts of his elder brother, Malcolm MacColl, an Anglican clergyman, and friend and political ally of William Ewart Gladstone. Early in his acqaintanceship with Gladstone, Malcolm MacColl persuaded the Liberal politician to provide funds for Hugh's education at Oxford and it was proposed to send him to St Edmund Hall. However Gladstone made this conditional on Hugh MacColl agreeing to take orders in the Church of England. Hugh MacColl refused this condition and, as a result, never obtained a university education - a fact which perhaps limited his contribution to philosophy and certainly prevented him from ever obtaining a formal academic position.^[1]

After a few years working in different areas of Great Britain, MacColl moved to Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, where he developed the greater part of his work and went on to become a French citizen. He is known for three main accomplishments:

• In 1877-79, while working out a problem involving integration, he published a four-part article setting out the first known variant of the propositional calculus, calling it the "calculus of equivalent statements", anteceding Gottlob Frege's Begriffschrifft. He subsequently published 11 articles in Mind, 1880-1908, and a text,^[2] in an effort to draw the attention of philosophers to his work.

• C. I. Lewis credited MacColl's late work on the nature of implication as the source of the basic ideas behind Lewis's pathbreaking work in modal logic.

• MacColl's work represents one of the first approaches to logical pluralism where he explores the possibilities of modal logic, logic of fictions, connexive logic, many-valued logic and probability logic.

MacColl was not obscure in his day. He was a lifelong regular contributor to the Educational Times. His correspondents included the logicians William Stanley Jevons and Charles Peirce. He also corresponded, and argued in print, with the young Bertrand Russell, and reviewed Alfred North Whitehead's 1898 Universal Algebra for Mind. Nor is he forgotten now; there is an ongoing MacColl Project, a joint venture of Greifswald University in Germany and the University of Oslo, which intends to publish a critical edition of his work. Furthermore, the group of logic and epistemology at the University of Lille (France) develop MacColl's suggestions for a dynamic free logic. The December 1999 issue of the Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic published the proceedings of a 1998 conference devoted to MacColl's work.

MacColl published two novels, now forgotten yet containing elements of science fiction, that reveal social and moral values to which he gave full expression in his 1909 Man's Origin, Destiny, and Duty, an apology for Christianity.

[edit] References

• Rahman, S. & Redmond, J., 2008. "Hugh MacColl and the Birth of Logical Pluralism". In: Handbook of History of Logic. Elsevier, vol. 4. Discusses MacColl's contributions to philosophy of language and logic including modal logic, logic of fictions and modal logic.
• Rahman, S. & Redmond, J., 2007. Hugh MacColl. An Overview of his Logical Work with Anthology. College Publications. Contains a long introduction to MacColl's logic and reprints of his main logical work.
• Kneebone, G., 2001 (1963). Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics. Dover. Contains a brief introduction to the "calculus of equivalent statements."
• Rahman, S. & Rückert, H., 2001. "Dialogical Connexive Logic". In Synthese, vol. 127, 1-2, pp. 105-139.
• Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.

[edit] External links

• Special Hugh MacColl issue of the Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic.
• Hugh MacColl bibliography from that special issue, by the MacColl Project.