John Cook Wilson

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For other persons named John Wilson, see John Wilson (disambiguation).

John Cook Wilson (born Nottingham 6 June 1849, died 1915) was an English philosopher.

Contents

[edit] Education

The only son of a Methodist minister, after Derby School he went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1868, where he read both Classics and Mathematics, gaining a double First in both.

[edit] Religion

He often argued the existence of God as an experiential reality, quoted saying "We don't want merely inferred friends, could we be satisfied with an inferred God?"

[edit] Career summary

Wilson became a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford in 1873. He was Wykeham Professor of Logic and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, from 1889 until his death. H. A. Prichard and H. H. Price were among his students.

Belonging to a generation brought up in the atmosphere of British idealism, he espoused the cause of philosophical realism. His posthumous collected papers, Statement and Inference, were influential on a generation of Oxford philosophers. He features prominently in the work of Austin and John McDowell.

[edit] Author

  • Statement and Inference by John Cook Wilson, edited from the manuscripts by A.S.L. Farquharson (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1926)
  • Statement and Inference (new edition, Thoemmes Continuum, 2007, 1091 pages) ISBN-10 185506958X
  • On Military Cycling or Amenities of Controversy (1889)
  • On the Interpretation of Plato's Timaeus (1886, new edition 1980) ISBN-10 0824095715
  • Aristotelian Studies I (1879)
  • On the Platonist Doctrine of the Asymbletoi Arithmoi (new edition, 1980) ISBN-10 0824095715

[edit] Family

Wilson married a German wife, Charlotte Schneider, in 1876. They had no children.

[edit] Trivia

  • He had a long running dispute with Lewis Carroll over the Barber Shop Paradox.

[edit] References