William Kingdon Clifford

1845-1879 · English · Epistemology of belief, philosophy of science, geometry

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

He was Second Wrangler at Cambridge, a professor of mathematics at University College London at twenty-six, and dead of tuberculosis at thirty-three. In between he did the geometry that carries his name, gave a paper in 1870 suggesting that matter might be nothing but variation in the curvature of space and that this curvature might propagate in waves — a suggestion nobody could make anything of for forty-five years, until Einstein — and wrote a nine-page essay that has been argued about ever since.

Topics William Kingdon Clifford addresses

• the ethics of belief
• the shipowner
• insufficient evidence
• credulity
• the duty of inquiry
• evidentialism
• the weight of authority
• the limits of inference
• mind-stuff
• the elementary feeling
• consciousness as a compound
• the objective and the subjective order
• space-theory of matter
• the curvature of space
• non-Euclidean geometry
• Clifford algebras
• biquaternions
• the scientific basis of morals
• the tribal self
• conscience as social
• right and wrong
• the postulates of the science of space

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