Robert Leslie Ellis, William Whewell and Kant: the role of Rev H F C Logan

Abstract

Reverend H F C Logan is put forward as the formerly unidentified figure to which Robert Leslie Ellis referred in a journal entry of 1840 in which he wrote that it was due to his influence that William Whewell came to uphold particular Kantian views on time and space. The historical evidence of Ellis’s early familiarity with, and later commitment to Kant is noteworthy for at least two reasons. Firstly, it puts into doubt the accepted view of the second generation of reformers of British algebra as non-philosophical, practice-oriented mathematicians. Secondly, in so far as Logan was the correspondent of William Rowan Hamilton, it re-emphasizes that the role of Kantianism in the transition from ‘symbolical’ to ‘abstract’ algebra in nineteenth-century British algebra requires closer scrutiny.

Notes

¹ There is little biographical information available on the life of Logan. The remarks about his life provided in this section are drawn from the following sources: Beaumont (2010, 261), Dessain (1961, 588), McGrath (2008, 704) and Oliver (1857, 347).

² See Lally (1942, 5), MacDougall (1962, 6) and Mathew (1968, 23) for the intellectual connection between Logan and his Edinburgh students such as Lord Acton.

³ See Mander (2014) for a recent, and Wallek (1931) for a classic account of the introduction of Kantianism in Britain and, more specifically, at Cambridge. For a more general analysis of the content and diffusion of idealism in the early-Victorian era see, for example, Preyer (1981).

⁴ For the influence of Kant on Whewell’s philosophy of science see, for example, Butts (1969) and Snyder (2006, chapter 1).

⁵ I would like to thank Maite Karssenberg for her valuable historical comments and the referee for her/his careful reading and helpful suggestions.