REVIEWS
“By interweaving the life and work of John Venn—today remembered mainly as the inventor of the eponymous diagram—Verburgt animates an important and often overlooked figure in the history of probability theory and logic, revealing Venn to be a crucial ‘missing link’ in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. He shows that Venn’s religious transformation provides insight into how a cleric of the time could reconcile religion with a post-Darwinian view of the natural world. Indeed, had he been born forty years earlier, he could have been a worthy member of the Philosophical Breakfast Club. An essential read for anyone interested in Venn, probability theory, logic, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual history.
— Laura J. Snyder, author of The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World
"You’ll never see a Venn diagram in the same way. This fine biography brings a complex and sometimes intellectually tortured polymath vividly to life for the first time, shedding new light on religion, science, and philosophy in the Victorian era."
— James A. Secord, author of Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age
"John Venn died in 1923, and for the next century his academic work, and indeed his life, has had little critical attention. When fifty years ago my elder daughter was taught about Venn's diagram in her Cambridge school, I asked her if they told her who Venn was. 'Oh, was he a person?' she replied. So I took her to the local churchyard (for I knew Venn lived in our parish) and we soon found his grave, overgrown and neglected. Now at last, in this wonderful scholarly book, Verburgt ends this neglect with a dozen chronological chapters divided into the main themes of logic, probability, moral science, religious thought, and biography. Venn was one of the stalwart reformers of Victorian Cambridge as it arose from its slumbers, helping to start a Moral Sciences Tripos. For the whole of his academic life he was employed by his individual Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius, where he had read mathematics as a student and to which he was devoted. His memorial can be found there, in the dining hall: a stained-glass window depicting the diagram for three sets. This is an inspirational book for students and scholars of the history of philosophy and science."
— A. W. F. Edwards, author of Cogwheels of the Mind: The Story of Venn Diagrams
“Ask someone about John Venn and the chances are they’ll mention the diagrams. But, as this biography by Verburgt shows, there is much more to Venn than those intersecting circles.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Verburgt’s book is well worth reading. It sheds new light on one side of intellectual life in Victorian England.”
— SIAM News
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Family, Childhood, and Youth (1834–53) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0001
[Venn family;evangelicalism;religion;Henry Venn;Church Missionary Society]
The most important fact about the life of John Venn was that he was born into the Venn family, whose twin heritage of a clerical and an Evangelical dynasty created the expectations that he was to live up toand determined his room for existential maneuver. This chapter explores Venn's upbringing as the private application of the familial ideal that the Venn family self-consciously created and publicly advocated. Drawing on the extensive family archive - primarily the Parentalia and Annals of a Clerical Family - as well as Venn's own autobiographical recollections recorded in the "Annals," it develops an understanding of the Venn family household as a domestic site where certain Evangelical ideals and standards were turned into practice. The aim is to find in John Venn's motherless youth a starting point of his religious identity, to be built on in future chapters, while contributing to a better grasp of the nature of an Evangelical upbringing in 1830s Britain, in which God permeated every part of daily life, within one of the most prominent Evangelical families of the Victorian era. (pages 1 - 27)
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2. Student (1853–57) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0002
[history of the University of Cambridge;evangelicalism;Victorian Britain;student life;University of Cambridge]
The Venn family was an example par excellence of the fact that academic education in Britain had always been to a considerable extent influenced by "family sympathy and tradition" and that generation after generation often resorted to the same university and even to the same college. When Venn was admitted to Gonville and Caius College on 25 June 1853, and matriculated at Cambridge in October of that same year, he represented the eighth generation of Venns to enter university and the fifth generation of Cantabrigian Venns. Given his ancestry, Venn was destined for Cambridge as much as he was for Caius, then the Evangelical College in popular estimate. The college would be a constant element in Venn's religious and academic identity: he would remain a member of Caius for nearly seventy years, as a student and fellow, as clergyman and layman. Any examination of Venn's life should therefore take into consideration the institutional backdrop against which his change of religious perspective and choice for an academic career took place. This chapter covers the period of his studentship. Venn's well-documented undergraduate experience at Cambridge offers a valuable personal perspective from which to view aspects of the broader theme of university reform. (pages 28 - 41)
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3. Curate (1857–62) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0003
[evangelicalism;religion;crisis of faith;Victorian Britain]
Following his graduation in 1857, Venn prepared for Holy Orders and took several livings as an Evangelical curate. This was a short period in which he publicly followed the Venn family tradition. Venn would later look back highly critically upon the adequacy of his training for his role as a curate as well as on the personal example of the Evangelical clergymen under whom he served. The first part of this chapter discusses Venn's retrospective observations of his clerical preparation and experiences in light of familialexpectations and paternal influence. It was as a curate that Venn started to examine whether his Evangelicalism was a hereditary system adopted from habit or a creed acceptable on the basis of honest conviction. The second part of this chapter describes the conflict that emerged between Venn's public and private religious position and the ways in which his reading and discussion of new texts and ideas informed his growing theological divergence from certain core Evangelical tenets. (pages 42 - 60)
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4. Intellectual Breakthrough (1862) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0004
[John Stuart Mill;Henry Thomas Buckle;history of social science;history of sociology]
This chapter continues the story of Venn's intellectual development in the period between the late 1850s and early 1860s. The focus will be on his reading and discussion of new philosophical, rather than theological, ideas during his time as a student and curate. Here, the key event was Venn's introduction to the work of John Stuart Mill, which posed fundamental challenges to his approach to religion while also offering him a starting point for the development of his own secular identity. Drawing on his wide reading, particularly of Mill and Buckle, Venn made his first foray into printin 1862, aged 27, while still working as a curate in Mortlake. The paper - 'Science of History' - whose context and content will be examinedin detail, proved to be a modest breakthrough: it took an important step towards his first book, the Logic of Chance, and it was instrumental in his decision to return to residence in Cambridge shortly after its appearance. (pages 61 - 78)
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5. Moral Scientist (1862–69) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0005
[University of Cambridge;Moral Sciences Tripos;university reform;Liberal Anglicanism;Mathematical Tripos;John Grote;Frederick Denison Maurice]
When Venn first came up to Cambridge in 1853, he had found an unreformed University that was still very much a pillar of the Church of England. Venn himself was very much a creature of the old system dominated by the Mathematical Tripos. Some ten years later, when he returned to Cambridge to pave his own road from Evangelical son to University don, he would contribute his share to the first major reform of the University and Colleges since the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). During the 1860s, the contradiction between Venn's public and private religious positions that had become apparent at Mortlake were transplanted into a new context. At Cambridge, his self-acquired identity as a professional logician and member ofinformal liberal Anglicancircles overlapped with the public expression of his inherited identity as an Evangelical clergyman and thinker. This chapter examines Venn's contribution to University and College reform and the emerging aspects of his academic identity as a teacher, reformer and participant in Cambridge life. These aspects are placed in the context of broader changes in teaching and learning at Cambridge. (pages 79 - 100)
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6. Probability (1866) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0006
[The Logic of Chance;probability theory;frequency theory of probability;natural theology;scientific methodology]
The 1860s were marked by two major events in Venn's academic life: the appointment to a Moral Sciences teaching post at Cambridge and the publication of the Logic of Chance (1866), the first and most influential of his three books on logic. This chapter examines the origins, content, and legacy of the Logic of Chance. The book dealt with probability theory, covering its foundations, scope, and application. Venn showed that the subject was not merely mathematical but also philosophical as it touched on themes standing at the heart of natural theology and scientific methodology. The book almost single-handedly put probability theory on the philosophical agenda at Cambridge, where it would later be pursued by J.M. Keynes, C.D. Broad, and Frank Ramsey, among other luminaries. (pages 101 - 124)
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7. Religious Thinker (1867–73) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0007
[evangelicalism;Broad Churchman;probability theory;pragmatism;history of nineteenth-century philosophy]
Around the late 1860s, Venn's self-acquired academic identity began to overlap with his inherited identity as a prominent Evangelical. His active role in the Moral Sciences Tripos and his membership of the Grote Club brought him into contact with some of the most advanced religious and philosophical opinion at Cambridge. At that same time, Venn emerged onto the public Evangelical platform in and around Cambridge, taking occasional clerical duties and serving as the Junior and Senior Dean of Caius College as well as participating in Evangelical society and contributing to the Evangelical Christian Observer. Venn also developed himself as a religious writer critical of Evangelicalism. Boththe Logic of Chanceand his Hulsean Lectures (1869)contained contributions to a religious logic which put into academic form his wide reading and his private examination of the nature and truth of religious belief. As this chapter will show, Venn's work, in this regard, will be shown to have anticipated key insights from the tradition of pragmatism, founded in America by William James and C.S. Peirce. (pages 125 - 148)
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8. Logic Papers (1874–80) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0008
[logic;history of modern logic;history of British logic;George Boole;John Stuart Mill]
During the period between the 1870s and late 1880s, Venn devoted himself entirely to the study and teaching of logic. It was in these years that he became a professional logician, widening his intellectual circle to include colleagues at other universities, both at home and abroad, with similar, specialized and professionalized, scholarly interest. Both Symbolic Logic (1881) and the Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (1889), the two books written after the Logic of Chance, were the outcome of his ordinary lectures to Cambridge students and the publication, between 1874 and 1880, of a dozen papers in academic journals such as Mind. With these publications, Venn carved out a distinctive place for himself on the landscape of British logic. Like his major rival William Stanley Jevons, Venn was primarily concerned with weaving together two strands of British logic: Mill's inductive logic and Boole's algebraic, deductive logic. The study of Venn's work on logic provides an opportunity to fill a long-standing gap in the history of nineteenth-century British philosophy. This chapter makes a start by taking up Venn’s transitional papers from the 1870s. (pages 149 - 176)
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9. Algebraic Logic (1881) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0009
[symbolic logic;algebraic logic;algebra of logic;history of nineteenth-century logic;history of modern logic;George Boole;Gottlob Frege]
Venn's Symbolic Logic (1881) was the 450-page outcome of a two-decade-long attempt to make sense of Boole's algebraic logic. The book appeared at a time when the Boolean reform of logic, after some thirty years of silence and miscomprehension, was finally beginning to materialize. Venn brought Boole's work into contact with his Continental predecessors and his British, American and German continuators, such as J.N. Keynes, C.S. Peirce and Ernst Schröder. From this followed the book's main aim: to show what Boole had achieved and to defend his achievement against alternative conceptions of logic, such as Gottlob Frege's. Venn's Symbolic Logic also had several original features: it introduced a new theory of existential import, a new proposal for a reasoning machine and the famous diagrammatic representation of propositions that came to bear Venn's name ('Venn diagrams'). The chapter shows that the book did for algebraic logic what the Logic of Chancedid for probability theory: it put it on the philosophical agenda at Cambridge, where it would attract the attention of W.E. Johnson,and a young student named Bertrand Russell. (pages 177 - 208)
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10. Dereverend Believer and Amateur Scientist (1883–90) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0010
[University of Cambridge;Moral Sciences Tripos;religion;agnosticism;anthropometry;Henry Sidgwick;Francis Galton]
The 1880s were marked by several turning points in Venn’s life; dramatic changes in his clerical, family and professional identities. Venn continued to build a solid reputation for teaching and examining in the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge and for scholarship, publishing Symbolic Logic (1881) and Principles of Empirical Logic (1889). He received academic recognition through election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1883, followed in the next year by the award of the degree of Doctor of Science at Cambridge. Although he would continue to look for preferment in the field of logic, Venn donated his large private collection of logical books to the Cambridge University Library and decided to turn to much less abstract pursuits, drawing on his increasingly quantitative knowledge of probability to do anthropometric, statistical and historical research. Meanwhile, in 1883 Venn took advantage of the Clerical Disabilities Act to resign Holy Orders and he and Susanna celebrated the birth of their son, John Archibald. These developments are taken up in this chapter. (pages 209 - 241)
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11. Scientific Logic (1889) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0011
[John Stuart Mill;William Stanley Jevons;scientific methodology;history of Cambridge Philosophy;Wilhelm Wundt;Cambridge Philosophy]
The 1880s were Venn's most productive decade as a logician, as he published Symbolic Logic, the much-expanded third edition of the Logic of Chance, and what would be his final book on logic, the 600-page Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. Venn's aim in Principles was to provide a systematic account of the so-called scientific outlook on logic, which he described to Galton as standing somewhere between Mill and Jevons. The result was a certain kind of conventionalism vis-a-vis the foundations of logic, mixed with a rather diffuse philosophical outlook on broader themes, one combining elements of pragmatism, idealism, and evolutionary thinking. While the book itself was widelyconsidered a failure, it did play a crucial role as part of the local historical background of Cambridge analytical philosophy. Indeed, through intermediary figures such as W.E. Johnson and C.D. Broad, Venn's books continued to be read and studied at Cambridge throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. (pages 242 - 268)
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12. Biographer (1891–1923) - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0012
[biography;amateur historians;Alumni Cantabrigienses;Gonville and Caius College;University of Cambridge;Victorian historical thinking]
During the 1880s, the same period in which he resigned Holy Orders and achieved national recognition of his academic achievements, Venn showed an increasing interest in history, not only of formal logic but also in that of his family, College and University. From the 1890s onwards, Venn began to experience that he was ‘enough of a Victorian’ to share in one of the paradoxes laying at the heart of Victorian culture: an adoration of its own age and a fascination for its past. With a melancholic sense of the passing of time and a zealous wish to capture, tabulate and even measure it, Venn came to devote himself more and more to antiquarian, biographical and historical research. Almost until the day of his death in April 1923, he worked patiently and meticulously, together with his wife and son, on a dozen historical works – ranging from Admissions to Gonville and Caius College (1887) and Annals of a Clerical Family (1904) to the monumental Alumni Cantabrigienses (1922-1954) –each drawn up as an expression of belonging and as a search for what it meant to be a Venn, a Caian and a Cantabrigian. (pages 269 - 292)
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Epilogue. A Worldless Victorian - Lukas M. Verburgt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.003.0013
[Victorianism;Albert Venn Dicey;Laura Mary Forster;First World War;John Archibald Venn;Cambridge]
The epilogue provides an account of Venn's Cambridge life in the years between 1900 and 1923, building on his correspondence with Albert Venn Dicey and Laura Mary Forster. It tells of his days of 'gentle leisure', working on the monumental Alumni Cantabrigienses, and of a changing Cambridge during the First World War. (pages 293 - 306)
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