Did Lewis Carroll own a copy of George Boole's Laws of thought? An argument from the sale catalogues

Abstract

Private libraries of scientists offer valuable information on their character, work, and acquaintances. Charles L Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) constructed an impressive library of several thousand volumes. The sale catalogue of Carroll's library reveals that it contained at his death most of the major logic works that would be expected for a British mathematical logician of the time. However, there is dispute as to the presence of the most important logic book of all: George Boole's Laws of thought (1854). The absence of this work would make both an unfortunate and an intriguing gap. This paper explains the source of this dispute and introduces a new argument from the sale catalogues centred on the dissemination of the books after the sale of the library.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and valuable comments that helped to improve a previous version of this paper. This work draws upon research support from the ERC project ‘Abduction in the age of uncertainty’ (PUT 1305, Principal Investigator: Professor Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council [PUT 1305].