Hugh MacColl (1837-1909) was a Scot who trained as a mathematician and became 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 Hugh was brought uplargely 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 acquaintanceship with Gladstone, Malcolm MacColl persuaded the Liberal politician to provide funds for Hugh's education at Oxford. It was proposed to send him to St Edmund Hall, but 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, which may have 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:
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 Sanders 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, 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.