Richard Whately

In an IHT op-ed on puns, Joseph Tartakovsky mentions Richard Whately (1787-1863), Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin and former Oxford Professor of Political Economy, as being renowned for his puns.   Whately was possibly the first person to represent an argument using a diagram, in his 1826 text book on logic, Elements of Logic.  Philosopher Tim van Gelder has a reproduction of Whately’s diagram here.
How nice to be remembered 150 years after one’s death for both one’s wit and one’s visual thinking processes.
References:
Chris Reed,  Douglas Walton and Fabrizio Macagno [2007]:  Argument diagramming in logic, law and artificial intelligence. Knowledge Engineering Review, 22 (1): 87-109.
Joseph Tartakovsky [2009]: Pun for the ages.  International Herald Tribune.  28 March 2009.
Richard Whately [1826]:  Elements of Logic. London, UK: Longmans, Green and Company, 1913. First published 1826.

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