Publications des Archives Henri Poincaré Publications of the Henri Poincaré Archives

Louis Couturat -Traité de Logique algorithmique

Bearbeitet von Oliver Schlaudt, Mohsen Sakhri

1. Auflage 2010. Buch. vIII, 317 S. Hardcover ISBN 978 3 0346 0410 9 Format (B x L): 15,5 x 23,5 cm Gewicht: 654 g

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Louis Couturat (1868–1914) was an outstanding intellectual of the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He is known for his work in the philosophy of mathematics, for his critical and editorial work on Leibniz, for his attempt to popularise modern logic in France, for his commitment to an international auxiliary language, as well as for his extended correspondence with scholars and mathematicians from Great Britain, the United States, Italy, and Germany. From his correspondence we know of four unpublished manuscripts on logic and its history, which were largely complete and some of which must have been of considerable size. We publish here for the first time in a critical edition the only one of these manuscripts that has been rediscovered: the Traité de Logique algorithmique, presumably written in the years 1899–1901. It is a highly interesting document of the academic reception and popularisation of symbolic logic in France. It provides evidence of the discussions and controversies which accompanied the creation of logic as a new branch of science. At the same time it completes the picture of Couturat’s work, which has been opened up to systematic study by the publication of important parts of his correspondence during the last decade. We append the article on Symbolic Logic of 1902 which Couturat wrote in collaboration with Christine Ladd- Franklin for Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. This article, as now becomes evident, is a sort of résumé of the Traité; at the same time it points the way to Couturat’s Algèbre de la Logique of 1905. It thus helps to situate the Traité in Couturat’s œuvre. The same purpose is served by the second document appended, a short part of Couturat’s report of the first International Congress of Philosophy, which took place in Paris in 1900. This report documents Couturat’s reception of Platon Poretsky, whose work was of considerable importance for the outline of L’Algèbre de la Logique and marks the main difference between this later work and the Traité. – Since history of modern logic already attracts a lot of attention, the introduction focusses on Couturat and his perspective on modern logic in order to provide information the reader may lack. Finally a critical apparatus should help the reader to find his way through the Traité and to understand its genesis.

Acknowledgements

We are much obliged to the Laboratoire d’Histoire des Sciences et de Philosophie – Archives Henri Poincaré (UMR 7117 CNRS / Nancy-Université), especially to Gerhard Heinz- mann, for the generous intellectual and material support which rendered possible the realisation of this project, as well as to the CDELI (Centre de documentation et d’étude sur la langue internationale) at the municipal library of La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland) for granting the printing licence for the manuscript. We are furthermore indebted to vi Preface a number of colleagues for their help and advice which were essential for our project. We would like to thank Paolo Mancuso (Berkeley), Peter McLaughlin (Heidelberg), Philippe de Rouilhan (Paris), Fabien Schang (Nancy/Dresden), Anne-Françoise Schmid (Lyon/Paris), Christian Thiel (Erlangen), and Paul Ziche (Utrecht).