John Cook Wilson (born Nottingham 6 June 1849, died 1915) was an English philosopher. The only son of a Methodist minister, after Derby School he went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1868, where he read both Classics and Mathematics, gaining a double First in both. Wilson became a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford in 1873. He was Wykeham Professor of Logic and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, from 1889 until his death. H. A. Prichard and W.D. Ross were among his students. Belonging to a generation brought up in the atmosphere of British idealism, he espoused the cause of direct realism. His posthumous collected papers, Statement and Inference, were influential on a generation of Oxford philosophers, including H. H. Price and Gilbert Ryle. He also features prominently in the work of J.L. Austin, John McDowell, and Timothy Williamson. P.F. Strawson's expression, 'the attributive tie', in Individuals, 1959, 168, is named 'in memory of Cook Wilson'.
Cook Wilson often argued the existence of God as an experiential reality, quoted saying "We don't want merely inferred friends, could we be satisfied with an inferred God?" He also had a long running dispute with Lewis Carroll over the Barber Shop Paradox. He was, along with H. A. Prichard, one of Oxford's few early twentieth-century philosophers, to have a mathematical bacground. He obtained 1sts in mathematics, classics and philosophy (1st Mathematical Moderations, 1869; 1st Classical Moderations, 1870; 1st Math. Finals, 1871; and 1st Literae Humaniores, 1872). Mathematics, he said, is the best preparation for logic Statement and Inference, I : xxxviii). There is an amusing story of how he introduced calculus in a lecture to classically trained undergraduates. At the end of the lecture 'he walked smartly to the door, locked, or pretended to lock, it, and then standing there with his back to it said with decision : 'No one shall leave this room until you all grasp the essentials of this simple matter': Statement and Inference, I : xv. He had, however, little sympathy with the mathematical logic developed by Bertrand Russell.
Cook Wilson's classical contributions should not be overlooked : 'On rearrangements of the Fifth Books of the Ethics' (1879), 'On the Structure of the Seventh Book of the Nicomachean Ethics, ch. i - x (1879); 'On the Interpretation of Plato's Timaeus' (1889); 'On the Geometrical Problem in Plato's Meno' (1903) and others listed at lxvi-lxxii of Statement and Inference, I. The latest discussion of Cook Wilson's classical work - on the Meno - is to be found in David Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason, Oxford : 2008, 164-9, 172.
Wilson married a German wife, Charlotte Schneider, in 1876. They had no children.
the chapter, 'Jones's wedding'.
| Wikisource has the text of a 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica article about John Cook Wilson. |