First edition. This is a significant association copy, with the ownership inscription of the logician and philosopher John Venn (1834–1923), the inventor of the eponymous diagram, on the title page: "John Venn. G & C Coll. 1880." Venn entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1853, obtaining his degree in 1857 and going on to become first a fellow of the college and then President in 1903. Venn popularised the frequentist view on probability which Cournot introduced here. Cournot was one of four writers from three countries (the others being Jakob Friederick Fries, Richard Leslie Ellis, and John Stuart Mill) who "independently proposed interpretations of probability that were fundamentally frequentist in character" (Skyrms and Harper, p. 188). However, "despite this early efflorescence, the frequency theory did not begin to gain widespread acceptance until its careful elaboration, nearly a quarter of a century later, in John Venn's Logic of Chance", published in 1866 (ibid.). Uncommon in commerce, with five copies traced at auction since 1975.
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