- Louis Couturat
Louis Couturat (
January 17 ,1868 -August 3 ,1914 ) was a Frenchlogic ian, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist.Life
Born in
Ris-Orangis (nearParis ),France , he was educated inphilosophy andmathematics at theÉcole Normale Supérieure . He held professorships, first at theUniversity of Toulouse , then subsequently at theCollege de France .He was "the" French advocate of the
symbolic logic that emerged in the years before WWI, thanks to the writings ofCharles Peirce ,Giuseppe Peano and his school, and especially to the "Principia Mathematica " byAlfred North Whitehead and Couturat's friend and correspondent,Bertrand Russell . Like Russell and Whitehead, Couturat saw symbolic logic as a tool to advance both mathematics and the philosophy thereof. In this, he was opposed byHenri Poincare , who took considerable exception to Couturat's efforts to interest the French in symbolic logic. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Couturat was in broad agreement with thelogicism of Russell and Whitehead, while Poincaré anticipatedBrouwer 'sintuitionism .His first major publication was Couturat (1896). In 1901, he published "La Logique de Leibniz", a detailed study of
Leibniz the logician, based on his examination of the huge Leibniz "Nachlass " in Hannover. Even though Leibniz had died in 1716, his "Nachlass" was cataloged only in 1895. Only then was it possible to determine the extent of Leibniz's unpublished work on logic. In 1903, Couturat published much of that work in another large volume, his "Opuscules et Fragments Inedits de Leibniz", containing many of the documents he had examined while writing "La Loqique". Couturat was thus the first to appreciate that Leibniz was the greatest logician during the more than 2000 years that separateAristotle fromGeorge Boole andAugustus De Morgan . A significant part of the 20th century Leibniz revival is grounded in Couturat's editorial and exegetical efforts. This work on Leibniz attracted Russell, also the author of a 1900 book on Leibniz, and thus began their professional correspondence and friendship.In 1905, Couturat published a work on logic and the foundations of mathematics (with an appendix on Kant's philosophy of mathematics) which was originally conceived as a translation of Russell's "Principles of Mathematics". In the same year, he published "L'Algèbre de la logique", a classic introduction to the
algebraic logic ofGeorge Boole ,Charles Peirce , andErnst Schroder .In 1907, Couturat helped found the artificial language
Ido , an offshoot ofEsperanto , and was Ido's principal advocate over the remainder of his life. By advocating an artificial international language, constructed along logical principles and with a vocabulary taken from existing European languages, Couturat was parallelingPeano 's advocacy of Interlingua. By pushing Ido, Couturat walked in Leibniz's footsteps; Leibniz called for the creation a universal symbolic and conceptual language he named thecharacteristica universalis .Ironically, this confirmed pacifist became one of the very first civilian casualties of
World War I , as he was killed when his car was hit by a car carrying orders for the mobilization of theFrench Army .ee also
*
Leibniz
*Ernst Schröder
*Ido
*Boolean algebra (logic)
*logicism References
*Primary literature:
**1896 [http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k678301 "De Platonicis mythis"] "Thesim Facultati Litterarum Parisiensi proponebat Ludovicus Couturat, Scholae Normalae olim alumnus". Parisiis: Edebat Felix Alcan Bibliopola. MDCCCXCVI. 120 p.
**1896. "De l'Infini mathématique". Republished 1975, Georg Olms.
**1901. "La Logique de Leibniz". Republished 1961, Georg Olms. [http://philosophy2.ucsd.edu/~rutherford/Leibniz/intro.htm Donald Rutherford's English translation in progress.]
**1903. "Opuscules et Fragments Inedits de Leibniz". Republished 1966, Georg Olms.
**1905. "Les Principes des Mathematiques: avec un appendice sur la philosophie des mathematiques de Kant". Rupublished 1965, Georg Olms.
**1905. " L'Algèbre de la logique". Jourdain, P.E.B., trans., 1914. "The Algebra of Logic". Open Court. [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10836 Project Gutenberg] .
**1910 Louis Couturat, O. Jespersen, R. Lorenz, Wilhelm Ostwald and L.Pfaundler, International Language and Science: Considerations on the Introduction of an International Language into Science", Constable and Company Limited, London.
*Secondary literature:
**1983. "L'oeuvre de Louis Couturat". Presses de l'Ecole Normale Superieure. Proceedings of a conference.
**Ivor Grattan-Guinness , 2000. "The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940". Princeton Uni. Press. Bibliography contains 27 items by Couturat.External references
* [http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Couturat.html Online biography.] MacTutor at St. Andrews University. Scotland.
External links
*
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.