Abstract
Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre was published in 1837, although most of it seems to have been written during the decade 1820–1830. John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic was published in 1843, but had been in gestation or preparation since 1825. Neither author seems to have exercised any influence on the other, and in their views about the fundamental nature of logical and mathematical reasoning they notoriously represented very different trends. Bolzano sought to direct philosophers’ attention away from mental processes towards relationships between ideas in themselves and between propositions in themselves, while Mill’s logic insisted on a study of the mental process which takes place whenever we reason, of the conditions on which this process depends, and of the steps of which it consists. But in their views about the methodology of natural science the divergences are much more finegrained. Both assign a central role to the search for causes and both discuss the same basic procedures for the discovery of these. It is just that Bolzano shows a greater sensitivity than Mill does to the inherent difficulties of the enterprise.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Cohen, L.J. (1990). Bolzano’s Theory of Induction. In: Salmon, M.H. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism. Synthese Library, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_2
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