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The Logician in the Archive: John Venn’s Diagrams and Victorian Historical Thinking
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 82, Number 4, October 2021
- pp. 593-614
- 10.1353/jhi.2021.0034
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
Like the overlapping circles of his famous diagrams, English probability theorist, logician, and historian John Venn (1834–1923) operated at a site of productive intersection. Across a career comprising seemingly disparate pursuits, Venn exhibited an epistemic apparatus shaped by a mathematical probability, formal logic, and British historicism. Scholarly interest in Venn has tended to isolate these elements; I argue that a deep continuity joined his projects. The unappreciated coherence of his work reveals larger convergent currents in Victorian historical thinking, a kind of statistical attitude according to which large series of elite individuals constituted the most illuminating historical subject.