A Syntax of Phenomena: William Stanley Jevons’s Logic and Philosophy of Science as an Ars Combinatoria

According to the nineteenth-century polymath William Stanley Jevons, natural phenomena were a series of combinations and permutations. The similarity between Jevons’s account and other instances of ars combinatoria has already been noticed, although this topic has never been extensively addressed in the literature. In this paper I offer a novel interpretation of Jev-ons’s logic and philosophy of science as an art of combinations. Jevons’s position shall be compared with other theorizers in the ars combinatoria tradition. This study will show that Jevons’s art of combinations differed from some of the examples here investigated because he did not believe that language could refer to the primal constituents of reality. Rather, his art of combinations relied on the order of combinations, displaying a syntactical nature. Conse-quently, I will argue that Jevons’s logic presents some relevant similarities to Leibniz’s char-acteristica. Moreover, this analysis offers a contribution to the study of Jevons’s logic, high-lighting the ontological implications embedded in his logical thought.