Abstract

George Bentham was not only a great natural historian, he was, initially, a philosopher and logician of enormous promise. His first published work, the oft-forgotten Outline of a new system of logic (1827) has been heralded by some as the opening salvo in the overthrow of the Aristotelian syllogism's grip on logical inference. The move was a defiant political gesture. The young Bentham composed Outline in close concert with his famous uncle, the great utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, expanding and evolving Jeremy's attempts at a new logical system. Bentham meant Outline to be a contribution to the development of the whole utilitarian project. Yet, after 1827, Bentham was never again to write explicitly on logic and philosophy. His heart seemed to lie in natural history, his first love. However, Bentham never really abandoned the utilitarian picture of logic and philosophy. Recent discoveries in the Bentham papers reveal the strong connection between the Benthamite attack on received philosophical categories and George's role in the development of modern institutional natural history. Bentham the logician can be discovered in Bentham the reformist naturalist. This paper examines Bentham's role in the development of the “new” logic and attempts to explore the notions of a reformed naturalism in his later works. This offers an explanation for Bentham's cautious response to the second great revolution of the nineteenth century: the Darwinian revolution.