Carveth Read (1848–1931) was a 19th- and 20th-century

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English ...

philosopher and logician.

Life

He was born 16 March 1848 in Falmouth, Cornwall, England. He was the third son of Edward Read and Elizabeth Truscott. He attended the University of Cambridge (Christ's College). He received a B.A. (Moral Sciences Tripos, 1st) in 1873 and an M.A. in 1877. He was the Hilbert travelling scholar, studying at Leipzig and Heidelberg Universities in 1874-1877. In 1877 he married Evelyn Thompson. From 1878 he lectured at Wren's 'Coaching' establishment (located at 7 Powis Square, Westbourne Park, London). He was Grote professor of philosophy of mind and logic at the

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

(UCL) from 1903 to 1911. From 1911 to 1921 he was Lecturer in Comparative Psychology at UCL. He died 6 December 1931 in Solihull, Warwickshire, England.

Work

In the preface to the fourth edition of his book ''Logic: Deductive and Inductive'' (1920), he identifies his significant influences. He states, "the work may be considered, on the whole, as attached to the school of Mill; to whose System of Logic, and to Bain's Logic, it is deeply indebted. Amongst the works of living writers, the Empirical Logic of Venn and the Formal Logic of Keynes have given me most assistance." In Chapter 22 of Logic, Read says: "It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong", the original source of the much quoted aphorism "It is better to be roughly right than exactly wrong" that is often incorrectly attributed to John Maynard Keynes. Carveth Read also wrote about

human evolution Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of ''Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development o ...

. He was an early proponent of the

hunting hypothesis In paleoanthropology, the hunting hypothesis is the hypothesis that human evolution was primarily influenced by the activity of hunting for relatively large and fast animals, and that the activity of hunting distinguished human ancestors from o ...

— the idea that human intelligence evolved thanks to the emergence of an ape lineage that did more hunting than other apes.

Bibliography

* ''On the Theory of Logic: An Essay'' (1878) * ''Logic: Deductive and Inductive'' (1898 – first edition) * ''The Metaphysics of Nature'' (1905 - first edition) * ''Natural and Social Morals'' (1909) * ''The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions'' (1920)

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Read, Carveth 1848 births 1931 deaths 19th-century British philosophers 20th-century British philosophers British logicians Academics of University College London