William Calvert Kneale (22 June 1906 – 24 June 1990) was an

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

logician Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

best known for his 1962 book ''The Development of Logic'', a history of logic from its beginnings in

Ancient Greece Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...

written with his wife

Martha Martha (Hebrew: מָרְתָא‎) is a biblical figure described in the Gospels of Luke and John. Together with her siblings Lazarus and Mary of Bethany, she is described as living in the village of Bethany near Jerusalem. She was witness to ...

. Kneale was also known as a

philosopher of science A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

and the author of a book on

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

and

induction Induction, Inducible or Inductive may refer to: Biology and medicine * Labor induction (birth/pregnancy) * Induction chemotherapy, in medicine * Induced stem cells, stem cells derived from somatic, reproductive, pluripotent or other cell t ...

. Educated at the Liverpool Institute High School for boys, he later became a fellow of

Exeter College, Oxford Exeter College (in full: The Rector and Scholars of Exeter College in the University of Oxford) is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England and the fourth-oldest college of the un ...

, and in 1960 succeeded to the

White's Professor of Moral Philosophy The White's Chair of Moral Philosophy was endowed in 1621 by Thomas White (c. 1550–1624), Canon of Christ Church as the oldest professorial post in philosophy at the University of Oxford. In 2021, the chair was renamed the Sekyra and White’s ...

previously occupied by the linguistic philosopher

J. L. Austin John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts. Austin pointed out that we u ...

. He retired in 1966.

Life and work

Kneale's interest in the

history of logic The history of logic deals with the study of the development of the science of valid inference (logic). Formal logics developed in ancient times in Indian logic, India, Logic in China, China, and Greek philosophy, Greece. Greek methods, particula ...

began in the 1940s. The focus of much of Kneale's early work was the legacy of the work of the 19th century logician

George Boole George Boole (; 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ire ...

. His first major publication in the history of logic was his paper "Boole and the Revival of Logic," published in the philosophy journal

Mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...

in 1948. He was also the author of a number of papers in

philosophical logic Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. Some theorists conceive philosophical ...

, particularly on the nature of

truth Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs ...

for

natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...

s, and the role that linguistic concepts play in the treatment of logical

paradoxes A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...

. Kneale worked on his great history of logic from 1947 to 1957 together with his wife Martha (who was responsible for the chapters on the ancient Greeks). The result was the 800-page ''The Development of Logic'', first published in 1962, which went through five impressions before going into a second, paperback, edition in 1984. The 'History' is commonly referred to in the academic world simply as "Kneale and Kneale". It was the only major history of logic available in English in the mid-twentieth century, and the first major history of logic in English since ''The Development of Symbolic Logic'' published in 1906 by A. T. Shearman. The treatise has been a standard work in the history of logic for decades. In 1938 he married Martha Hurst; they had two children, George (born 1942) and Jane (married name Heal); born 1946).

References

* Thomas Drucker and Irving H. Anellis
'William Kneale' memorial notice
''Modern Logic'' Volume 3, Number 2 (1993), 158–161. {{DEFAULTSORT:Kneale, William 1906 births 1990 deaths English logicians People educated at Liverpool Institute High School for Boys White's Professors of Moral Philosophy Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford Philosophers of science Academics from Liverpool 20th-century British philosophers Presidents of the Aristotelian Society English philosophers Fellows of the British Academy