Hugh MacColl after One Hundred Years

The richness and originality of MacColl’s intellectual production made him well known in his lifetime, but his name almost vanished in secondary literature after his death. Except for some occasional references, one has to wait until the 1980s to see MacColl’s work rediscovered thanks to the research carried out at Erlangen by Christan Thiel, Volker Peckhaus and Anthony Christie. This work was pursued in the 1990s, mainly by Michael Astroh and Shahid Rahman and culminated in the organisation of a colloquium on ‘Hugh MacColl and the Tradition of Logic’ that took place in Greifswald (29 March - 1 April 1998), the proceedings of which appeared as Astroh & Read (ed.), Hugh MacColl and the Tradition of Logic, special issue of the Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic, 3 (1998). Those proceedings together with a biographical paper published shortly afterwards (Astroh, Grattan-Guinness & Read, ‘A survey of the life and work of Hugh MacColl (1837-1909)’, History and Philosophy of Logic, 22 (2001), 81-98; reprinted in this volume) became the starting point of all the research carried out since, notably by Rahman and his colleagues in Lille (Rahman & Redmond, Hugh MacColl: an Overview of his Logical Work with Anthology, London: College Publications 2007]. In 2009, on the occasion of the centenary of MacColl’s death, a commemorative meeting was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer (France), the city where he lived from 1865 to his death in 1909. All but one of the papers in the present volume were first presented at that centenary meeting.