18 May 2022, Book launch workshop "John Venn: A life in logic", Virtual

All are invited to join the online book launch of Lukas M. Verburgt's John Venn: A Life in Logic  (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) in the form of an online mini-workshop.

Date & time. Wednesday 18th May 2022, 4:00pm-5:30pm (Amsterdam/Brussels-time)

Location. Microsoft Teams

Registration. Please send an email to johnvenn2022 at gmail.com. Upon registration, you'll receive a link to the Teams meeting and a promo code, which can be used to order the book at 30% off from Chicago's website.

Program:

• Welcome David E. Dunning (Oxford)
• 'Introduction: John Venn's Life and Logic' Lukas M. Verburgt (NIAS/Leiden)
• 'Venn's Pluralism regarding Logical Forms' Dirk Schlimm (McGill) and David Waszek (CNRS)
• 'Venn's Diagrams' Amirouche Moktefi (Tallinn University of Technology)
• 'Venn and C.S. Peirce' Claudia Cristalli (Indiana State University)
• Plenary discussion, chaired by David E. Dunning

Description:

John Venn (1834-1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now eclipsed Venn's own status as one of the most accomplished logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a "high successful thinker" with much "power of original thought," Venn had a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll and Charles Sanders Peirce.

Venn wrote influential textbooks on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational reform, including that of women's higher education. Moreover, through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the early analytic philosophy of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group.

The book takes readers on Venn's journey from Evangelical son to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing on Venn's key writings and correspondence, published and unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the logician's wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on broader themes in religion, science, and the university in Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many sympathies -- sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly contradictory.