Everything about Louis Couturat totally explained
Louis Couturat (
January 17,
1868 -
August 3,
1914) was a
French logician,
mathematician,
philosopher, and
linguist.
Life
Born in
Ris-Orangis (near
Paris),
France, he was educated in
philosophy and
mathematics at the
École Normale Supérieure. He held professorships, first at the
University of Toulouse, then subsequently at the
College de France.
He was
the French advocate of the
symbolic logic that emerged in the years before WWI, thanks to the writings of
Charles Peirce,
Giuseppe Peano and his school, and especially to the
Principia Mathematica by
Alfred 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 by
Henri 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 the
logicism of Russell and Whitehead, while Poincaré anticipated
Brouwer's
intuitionism.
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 Only then was it possible to determine the extent of Leibniz's unpublished work on logic.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'd 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 separate
Aristotle from
George Boole and
Augustus 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 of
George Boole,
Charles Peirce, and
Ernst Schroder.
In 1907, Couturat helped found the artificial language
Ido, an offshoot of
Esperanto, 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 paralleling
Peano'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 the
characteristica 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 the
French Army.
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