John Cook Wilson

Background

Cook Wilson, John was born on June 4, 1849 in Nottingham, England.

Education

Balliol College, Oxford.

Career

Professor of Logic, Oxford, 18891915.

Views

In the period between the death of T. H. Green in 1882 and his own in 1915 Cook Wilson was the dominating figure in Oxford philosophy and his pupils, above all H. A. Prichard and H. W. B. Joseph, ensured its persistence until well into the 1930s. Its first task was to undermine the authority of the local brand of absolute, or Hegelian, idealism, in whose doctrines Cook Wilson had been brought up. After Green’s death, Bradley remained a recluse: other idealists had gone already, like Bosanquet in 1881, or soon did. Against idealism's loosely edifying style of thought Cook Wilson argued with passionate, literal-minded, grammatically and lexicographically scrupulous tenacity. Where they had held that no statement does more than approximate to truth and certainty, he insisted that the axioms and demonstrated theorems of mathematics were both true and known for certain to be so. Against the idealist account of all intellectual activity as ■judgement’, he pointed out that in ordinary speech judgement is the result of inference. More important was what he saw as the damaging representation of knowledge, belief and bare conjecture as a continuum. In his view knowledge is unique, sui generis, susceptible of neither analysis nor definition. We cannot, he curiously maintained, know something without knowing that we do so. Since mathematics, in which Cook Wilson had some expertise, is the prime exemplar of knowledge, he was equally hostile to noneuclidean geometries and to the mathematical logic of Russell which agreed with the objectionable view of Bradley that general statements of the form all A are B are really hypotheticals. Knowledge requires an independent object, neither changed, let alone created, by the mind of the knower nor, necessarily, itself a state of mind. Cook Wilson, however, qualified his realism by holding that only the primary, spatial qualities of things are known as they are in perception. In a famous lecture which look two evenings to deliver, he argued for the existence of God as the only adequate object for our feelings of awe and reverence. Cook Wilson’s influence in Oxford has persisted, often unrecognizedly, until very recent times. Austin's treatment of knowledge has a Cook Wilsonian, or Prichardian, flavour as does his insistence on testing philosophical theses against ordinary language. Strawson’s critique of the distortions of the common meaning of the logical words, like all and if, by formal logic is even closer to Cook Wilson.

Interests

• Philosophical logic; epistemology.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  T. H. Green and Lotze.