the list

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:56 PM -0400 8/14/02, James A. Landau wrote:
>
>Not that this kind of etymology does not have its moments that even laypeople
>would appreciate.  For example, shudder if you ever see anything circa 1840
>attributed to "Sir William Hamilton."   It happens that there were two men by
>that name, both active at the same time: Sir William R.

Rowan, IIRC?

>Hamilton of Ireland
>and Sir William Hamilton bart of Scotland.  I had to go through some material
>by both of them in tracking down the word "commutative".
>
The latter, who had a lifelong rivalry with Augustus De Morgan (in
some ways the father of modern symbolic logic) and a vivid but
shorter-lived rivalry with our friend J. S. Mill of the etymological
fallacy (who also wrote a very long book attacking Hamilton*) is
usually known in logical and philosophical circles as Sir William
Hamilton of Edinburgh.

Larry

*Mill, John Stuart  (1867).  An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's
Philosophy (3d edn). London:  Longman.

P. S.
Hamilton baselessly accused De Morgan of dabbling in plagiarism and
of mathematics, the latter being evidently the worse sin for a
philosopher, while De Morgan accused Hamilton, less baselessly, of
being extremely careless due to his distrust of formalism.  Still,
Sir WH of E had (I've argued) a good deal of insight into what we
would now call the pragmatics of words like _some_, only he didn't
realize it was pragmatics.  The two also had a wonderful dispute over
the analysis of English "any".  I spent some great hours in the U. of
Edinburgh library in the fall of 1972 looking through old newspapers
and journals for some memorably insulting diatribes between Hamilton
and De Morgan.