W. STANLEY JEVONS: Collected Reviews and Obituaries. This item is unavailable.W. STANLEY JEVONS: Collected Reviews and Obituaries

William Stanley Jevons (1835-82) was a major figure in Victorian England who made ground-breaking contributions to the development of economics, logic and the philosophy of science. In economics, Jevons pioneered the application of statistical methods and created a new theory of value, based on utility instead of labour (The Theory of Political Economy, 1871). As a logician, he worked in the tradition of De Morgan and Boole, devising a "Logical Machine" that would perform reasoning processes on data entered via a keyboard. His "Primer of Logic", 1876, was reprinted more than forty times. In science, Jevons advocated a probabilistic methodology based on what he called "the inverse deductive method". His book "The Principles of Science" (1874) is one of the classic works in the philosophy of science of the 19th century. Thoemmes Press presents a collection of 19th-century responses to Jevons. These two volumes contain contemporary reviews of some 30 of Jevons's works, gathered from more than 40 journals and newspapers across the world. The range is wide - from a 20-page review of "The Coal Question..." in the "Quarterly Review" to a single paragraph on "A Serious Fall in the Price of Gold..." in the "Melbourne Argus". In total, some 100 reviews are included, as are a dozen obituaries of Jevons from England, France and the USA. Almost none of this material has ever been reprinted before. The collection is introduced by the distinguished Jevons scholar Takutoshi Inoue, and each batch of reviews is prefixed by an explanatory headnote written by Jevons expert, Bert Mosselmans. As an appendix to Volume 2, we include a revised version of Professor Inoue's definitive bibliography, which now lists 240 published writings by Jevons, plus all the known reviews of them.