John Venn

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.

First published in 1913, John Venn's collection of writings describes college life in the early days of the University of Cambridge. Venn, a leading British logician and moral scientist, was president of Gonville and Caius College, and had been a student at Cambridge in the 1850s. This volume of 'reminiscences of a reading man' contains articles he contributed to the college magazine, The Caian and speeches and addresses given at College Chapel and Hall. These are interspersed with letters written by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cambridge scholars, and embedded in a commentary that provides additional insights into student life and university politics. He also includes, as an appendix, 'College Life and Ways Sixty Years Ago', recounting his own student experiences. Ranging from the Elizabethan to the Victorian era, Early Collegiate Life offers an honest and delightful glimpse into the daily lives of Cambridge scholars of the past.

Venn, best known for his diagrams for set theory, primarily studied logic and probability theory. The present book is a study of the principles of logic, with special emphasis on inference and induction. From the Preface to the first edition (1889): 'As many readers will probably perceive, the main original guiding influence with me - as with most of those of the middle generation, and especially with most of those who approached logic with previous mathematical or scientific training - was that of Mill... I still continue to regard the general attitude towards phenomena, which Mill took up as a logician, to be the soundest and most useful for scientific study'. From the Preface to the Second Edition (1907): 'Though thus leaving the main outlines unaltered I have done what I could to improve the work, and to try to bring it up to date... A number of paragraphs have been altered, others have been re-written, and many hundreds of minor alterations, additions and corrections inserted'.