Copyright

Lukas Verburgt

Published On

2024-09-04

Page Range

pp. 106–150

Language

  • English

Print Length

45 pages

5. Augustus De Morgan

Meta-Scientific Rebel

Chapter of: Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy(pp. 106–150)
Augustus De Morgan’s work on mathematics and logic in the mid-nineteenth century is familiar to historians of both disciplines. What is less known is his work on scientific method, where he went against the grain of the dominant English view of knowledge, embodied most prominently by his former teacher William Whewell. De Morgan argued that in so far as induction rests upon probability, mathematics rather than observation is the motor of scientific progress. Drawing on De Morgan’s published work as well as on unpublished sources, such as his correspondence with Whewell, this chapter examines De Morgan’s meta-scientific views. What emerges is a rounded picture of De Morgan as a pioneer of a new probabilistic image of human knowledge that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy.

Contributors

Lukas Verburgt

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6007-1324

Lukas M. Verburgt is currently an independent scholar based in the Netherlands. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held visiting research positions at Leiden University, Trinity College, Cambridge, the Department for the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Verburgt has published widely on the history of philosophy, science and mathematics in Victorian Britain and is (co-)editor of A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859 (Springer, 2022) as well as the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to John Herschel and Cambridge Companion to Charles Babbage.