History Of Logic Research Articles

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HistoryVolume 90, Issue 297 p. 93-118 General First published: 27 January 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2005.00324.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Books reviewed: Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History. Ramsay MacMullen, Feelings in History, Ancient and Modern. Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom? C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective. J. C. D. Clark, Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History. Alun Munslow, The New History. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History. Historians Create a Global Past. David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empire 1415–1980. Hilary L. Rubinstein, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J. Edelheit and William D. Rubinstein, The Jews in the Modern World: A History since 1750. M. Mulholland and B. Pullan (eds), Judicial Tribunals in England and Europe, 1200–1700. The Trial in History. Volume I. R. A. Melikan (ed.), Domestic and International Trials, 1700–2000. The Trial in History. Volume II. Joseph Canning, Hartmut Lehmann and Jay Winter (eds), Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-modern and Modern Times. Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700. Mark McNeilly, Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare. Michael Stephenson (ed.), Battlegrounds: Geography and the History of Warfare. Clive Bloom, Violent London: 2,000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts. J. Benson and L. Ugolini (eds), A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing. Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers (eds), Eating Out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century. P. Riden (ed.), A History of the County of Northampton. Volume V Cleley Hundred. D. A. Crowley (ed.), A History of the County of Wiltshire. Volume XVII Calne Hundred. C. P. Lewis and A. T. Thacker (eds), A History of the County of Chester, Volume V, Part I: The City of Chester, General History and Topography. Gordon Biddle, Britain's Historic Railway Buildings: An Oxford Gazetteer of Structures and Sites. Colin Divall and Andrew Scott, Making Histories in Transport Museums. Keir Waddington, Medical Education at St Bartholomew's Hospital, 1123–1995. E. A. Heaman, St Mary's: The History of a London Teaching Hospital. David Taylor and Ruth Taylor, Mr Adams’ Free Grammar School. Richard Aldrich, The Institute of Education 1902–2002: A Centenary History. Doreen Rosman, The Evolution of the English Churches, 1500–2000. Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800. Justine Taylor, A Cup of Kindness: The History of the Royal Scottish Corporation, a London Charity, 1603–2003. Mary J. Henninger-Voss (ed.), Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture. Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (eds), The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives. R. V. Comerford, Ireland. Astrid Ringe, Neil Rollings and Roger Middleton, Economic Policy under the Conservatives, 1951–64: A Guide to Documents in The National Archives of the UK. Volume90, Issue297January 2005Pages 93-118 RelatedInformation

Postmodernism and Historical Inquiry: Spoiled For Choice?

I O Historically Speaking · January/February 2005 the form theycan take. These questions provide the standard ofadequacy against which the histories can be measured. Postmodernists, by drawing attention to the subjective and cultural sources ofhistorical knowledge, have concluded that such knowledge is nothingbut a personal and cultural construction, providinguswithno reliable information aboutthe past. In facthistorians often provide credible narratives and interpretations ofthe past, and give plausible analyses ofwhathappened in response to the questions people ask about past events. C. Behan McCullagh ¿ra readerandassociateprofessor inphilosophy at La Trobe University . His most recent book isThe Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (Routledge, 2004). 1 ER. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic:A SemanticAnalysis ofthe Historians Language (Martinus Nijhoff, 1983); Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History : Fear or Freedom? (Routledge, 2003); Alun Munslow, The New History (Pearson Education, 2003); Robert E. BerkhoferJr., Beyond the Great Story: History as TextandDiscourse (Harvard University Press, 1995); and KeithJenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (Routledge, 2003). 2 This I have attempted to do, most succinctly in my recent book The Logic ofHistory (Routledge, 2004). 3 Munslow, The New History, 166. 4 Ankersmit, NarrativeLogic. He sometimes wavers from this view slightly: see C. Behan McCullagh, "Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation," History and Theory 39 (2000): 58. 5 Hayden White, Metahistory: The HistoricalImagination in 19th-century Europe (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1975). 6 1 have analyzed and illustrated common forms of these patterns of interpretation in The Truth of History (Routledge, 1998). 7 Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings ofFrance: Monarchy and Nation, 987-1328, trans. L. Butler and RJ. Adam (Macmillan, 1964), ch. 12. Postmodernism and Historical Inquiry: Spoiled for Choice? Beverley Southgate For me, postmodernism definitively arrived on December 12, 1997. On that day the London Timesreported that Prime Minister Tony Blair had gone beyond the bounds of conventional diplomatic generosityby offering the Irish negotiator Gerry Adams nothingless than "a choice ofhistory." For a mere mortal to claim to have such dispensations in his gift may sound extraordinarily hubristic to historians brought up to assert their own unique rights over a past, the nature ofwhich itwas for them, and onlythem, to determine. But for those attempting to assess the implications of postmodernism for historical inquiry, Blair's offer does at least make a start. And as we grope ourway through something of a conceptual fog, the key word "choice" does provide one useful beacon. What Blair implied with his offer ofhistorical choicewas that, while the events ofthe past (with all their anger and frustration and violence) are undoubtedly there—or rather here, in our present—what actually matters is not their existence, their presenceperse, but rather our responses to them. We can look at them, respond to them, remember them, either in such a way as will lead to further disruption or one that will facilitate reconciliation . What Adams had, and what historians have, is a choice ofnarrative—a choice ofthe wayto "emplot" those past events or put them in a story that leads from them, through our present, and forward to the future. That seems to me to get to the heart of what postmodernism implies for historical inquiry—wherepostmodernism represents an attempt to theorize, and make some intellectual sense of, our actual situation in postmodernity ; and postmodernity I take to be simply a chronological category, with disputable boundaries like any other, but one that enables us at least provisionally to locate ourselves in the ever-rolling stream of time. Thus tentatively located, our condition seems to me to display a number ofinterlocking features, which can themselves be seen as the culmination ofhistorical trends. And the narrative net that I cast over that past catches at least the following in its mesh: first, a postCopernican decentering—an enforced realization that I personally am neither static nor the center of the universe, and that indeed there is no single or static center from which either nature or the past can be definitively viewed, assessed, described, and re-presented; second, that a skeptical philosophy, originating in classical antiquity, revived as a central ingredient of early modern thought, and newly regenerated, reminds us of humans' inherent inadequacy—physical and intellectual —in any pursuit of"truth," whether scientific or...

Book Review: Geraldine Brady. From Peirce to Skolem: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Logic

Book Review: Geraldine Brady. From Peirce to Skolem: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Logic

Once More . . . for the First Time: Aristotle and Hegel in the Logic of History

The paper begins by taking seriously Heidegger's provocative claims concerning Hegel's relationship to the Greeks. Most notably, the enigmatic assertion that Hegel, as the "last Greek," brings Greek philosophy to its completion through a historical thinking is considered in terms of the strange sense of repetition it opens up: the Hegelian presentation of Greek philosophy must both present that philosophy, repeat its movement, but also, in the repetition, present the truth of that movement for the first time. It thus must remain undecided whether Hegel's presentation only opens up a necessity already at work in Greek philosophical history or whether that presentation, in fact, first grants such necessity to that history. The singularity of Hegel's relation to the Greeks is then explored through an examination of Hegel's own statements concerning the singularity of Aristotle. In this way, it becomes apparent that Hegel's own thought, in its entirety, asserts itself as nothing other that a decisive repetition of the Aristotelian speculative thought of actuality. This exceptional position of Aristotle in Hegel's logic of history suggests that there is a need for another sense of history's movement, in which that movement does not simply progress but unfolds as the sin- gular dialogue between one Greek and one German.

‘Everybody makes errors’: The intersection of De Morgan's Logic and Probability, 1837 – 1847

For Ivor Grattan-Guinness on the occasion of his retirement. The work of Augustus De Morgan on symbolic logic in the mid-nineteenth century is familiar to historians of logic and mathematics alike. What is less well known is his work on probability and, more specifically, the use of probabilistic ideas and methods in his logic. The majority of De Morgan's work on probability was undertaken around 1837 – 1838, with his earliest publications on logic appearing from 1839, a period which culminated with the publication of his Formal Logic in 1847. This article examines the overlap between his work on probability theory and logic during the earliest period of his interest in both.

Book Review: Jesus and the Logic of History

Book Review: Jesus and the Logic of History

The Syllogism's Final Solution

In 1883, while a student of C. S. Peirce at Johns Hopkins University, Christine Ladd-Franklin published a paper titled On the Algebra of Logic, in which she develops an elegant and powerful test for the validity of syllogisms that constitutes the most significant advance in syllogistic logic in two thousand years. Sadly, her work has been all but forgotten by logicians and historians of logic. Ladd-Franklin's achievement has been overlooked, partly because it has been overshadowed by the work of other logicians of the nineteenth century renaissance in logic, but probably also because she was a woman. Though neglected, the significance of her contribution to the field of symbolic logic has not been diminished by subsequent achievements of others.In this paper, I bring to light the important work of Ladd-Franklin so that she is justly credited with having solved a problem over two millennia old. First, I give a brief survey of the history of syllogistic logic. In the second section, I discuss the logical systems called “algebras of logic”. I then outline Ladd-Franklin's algebra of logic, discussing how it differs from others, and explain her test for the validity of the syllogism, both in her symbolic language and the more familiar language of modern logic. Finally I present a rigorous proof of her theorem. Ladd-Franklin developed her algebra of logic before the methods necessary for a rigorous proof were available to her. Thus, I do now what she could not have done then.

Historians and Philosophers of Logic: Are They Compatible? The Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem as a Case Study

This paper combines personal reminiscences of the philosopher John Corcoran with a discussion of certain conflicts between historians of logic and philosophers of logic. Some mistaken claims about the history of the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem are analyzed in detail and corrected.

The Management of Temporality: Ethnomethodology as Historical Reconstruction of Practical Action

There has been a cleavage within the sociological community regarding the question of reflexivity. While some see ethnomethodology as inevitably adopting a constructivist point of view and argue that it can in no way avoid the problem of referential reflexivity, others cherish Harold Garfinkel's teaching that ethnomethodology should not be engaged in an ironic mode of theorizing and argue that the problem of referential reflexivity is totally misconceived. In this article, after showing why the advocates of referential reflexivity fail to indicate the nature of constructive work involved in the ethnomethodological studies of practical action, I will analyze some of the ethnomethodological studies of scientific practice conducted by the antireflexivists and demonstrate that, despite their arguments to the contrary, the antireflexivists are engaged in an ample dose of constructive work to render a sequence of experimental action intelligible. More specifically, I will argue that antireflexive ethnomethodologists” alleged recovery of the temporally situated logic of the members involves the narrative logic of history.

Nationalist consciousness

With what fearful compulsion do we return to it time and time again—like a tongue to a hollow tooth—this question of nationalism. As the potent 20th‐century ideology, nationalism—especially in its violent, exclusive context— remains a global blemish to peace activists everywhere. Nationalism forms part of the logic of history. It can read like a teleological, violent thriller. But to understand nationalism, we must examine the consciousness that underlies it.

Anapoda chronia: syllogikē mnēmē kai historia sto Ziaka Grevenōn (1900-1950) (review)

Reviewed by: [inline-graphic 01] [inline-graphic 02] Stathis N. Kalyvas Riki van Boeschoten. (1900–1950). Athens: Plethron. 1997. Pp. 249. The last months of 1997 in Greece saw a sudden and rather surprising renewal of public interest in the resistance and civil war, spurred by the successive (and commercially successful) publication of a number of books, almost all of them related to the emblematic figure of the military leader of ELAS, Aris Velouchiotis. There were newspaper articles, television debates, even controversy in Parliament. However, the quality of the books that generated this interest was overall poor. Arguably, the most important book was published by Grigoris Farakos, previously a secretary general of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), now at odds with this party. His book is based on Velouchiotis’s private archive, long thought to be lost, but somehow “retrieved” by Farakos from the KKE archives. [End Page 167] Velouchiotis’s papers shed light on his well-known fallout with the KKE leadership following the Varkiza agreements. The dispute was over the continuation of armed struggle, with Velouchiotis arguing (and then deciding despite the party’s wishes) to carry on the armed struggle, a decision that quickly led to his death. However, what could have been a major historical coup was botched by Farakos’s inappropriate use of this unique archival material, since he edited it in a way that violated the fundamental rules of historical research. As for the remaining books on Velouchiotis, these biographies based on secondary materials were informed more by the logic of mythology than the logic of history. Hence the paradox: although interest about the civil war remains high among the public, and publications abound, our knowledge of it remains sketchy, to say the least. In spite of a good grasp of archival material, particularly American, British, and more recently German, we are still in the dark about fundamental issues. What were the regional and social bases of the competing coalitions that fought the war? What was the role of class, ethnicity, ideology, and culture? How were the political identities that informed the civil war formed? How did political conflict lead to widespread violence? True, fundamental information is absent owing to factors independent of the historians’ will: cold war politics, which discouraged the examination of this issue up to the 1970s; polarized politics, which led to a huge production of heavily biased studies in the 1970s and 1980s; the wholesale destruction of police and related files in 1989; finally the persisting sad state of archival material in Greece. Totally missing from the recent media frenzy was a new book that contributes more to our understanding of this terrible period than all the recent books on Velouchiotis put together. This is Riki van Boeschoten’s case study of the village of Ziakas in the region of Grevena in Northern Greece during the period 1900–1950. Following in the footsteps of the path-breaking historical work of Yorgos Margaritis and Mark Mazower, van Boeschoten’s gives us a “bottom-up” perspective of the civil war. She makes up for the absence of archival material by cleverly using oral sources, while she also relies on a small but relevant number of written sources. Her “micro-history” of a single village and its surrounding area begins well before the civil war, but really focuses on the crucial decade of the 1940s. It is impossible to summarize in a review a book of such descriptive thickness. Suffice it to say that van Boeschoten provides the kind of perspective that could only be found up to now in literary works (the novels of Kostas Kotzias and Thanasis Valtinos come to mind), or glimpsed from a couple of articles by one or two anthropologists—for example, Stanley Aschenbrenner—who in the course of their anthropological research discovered that the villages they were studying had surprisingly violent histories. Such works give us a taste of the complexity of local and individual interactions during the civil war, but cannot substitute for systematic scholarly research. Van Boeschoten gives us the first systematic local-level study. Although the book’s empirical richness cannot be conveyed here, its main insights can. By combining anthropology and history, van...

Pierre de La Ram�e et le d�clin de la rh�torique

This article provides a basic general introduction to Ramus, and evaluates his role in the history of logic and rhetoric, especially with relation to the study of argumentation. The author agrees with Ong and other historians of logic that Ramus is not to be taken seriously as a logician, and that his undoubted importance in the history of ideas is to be found elsewhere. Ramus advocates a belief in nature, experience and reason, and rejects the reliance on the authority of ancient philosophers, above all Aristotle, though 'experience' does not mean scientific experiment and, paradoxically, includes the example of great philosophers and writers. In the end Ramus is seen as responsible for substituting for ancient classical rhetoric an entirely ornamental rhetoric of figures which was to take over education (with the exception of the Jesuit schools) almost until our own day. This curtailing and diminishing of rhetoric is seen as a degeneration. Ancient five-part rhetoric had been concerned with convincing and persuading: Aristotle distinguished the analytic, scientific reasoning of logic, from dialectic which was based on opinion and probability and had close links with rhetoric; by the time of Cicero and Quintilian, who addressed themselves to jurists and politicians, logic has given way to dialectic. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the two become assimilated; the evolution of this is traced here through the thirteenth-century Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain to the fifteenth-century German humanist logician Rudolph Agricola, who influenced Ramus partly through the intermediary of Johann Sturm. Ramus took over their topical theories but restricted them to logic/dialectic, and left rhetoric with little more than tropes and figures. He believed that there was only one method for teaching all the arts, and one dialectic common to them all. The distinction between analytical and dialectical has disappeared, with far-reaching consequences for the study of argumentation. Over the centuries logic has lost its connection with controversy and persuasion. With the development of the post-Cartesian, post-Baconian emphasis on the clarity of scientific discourse, and the mid-nineteenth-century interest in mathematical and formal logic, the process was complete. Argumentation, or the 'new rhetoric', aims to fill the gap thus created. © 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Radiation Effects: Cancer in Atomic Bomb Survivors . Itsuzo Shigematsu and Abraham Kagan, Eds. Japan Scientific Societies Press, Tokyo, and Plenum, New York, 1986. viii, 196 pp., illus. $55. GANN Monograph on Cancer Research no. 32.

Radiation Effects: <i>Cancer in Atomic Bomb Survivors</i> . Itsuzo Shigematsu and Abraham Kagan, Eds. Japan Scientific Societies Press, Tokyo, and Plenum, New York, 1986. viii, 196 pp., illus. $55. GANN Monograph on Cancer Research no. 32.

Early Cognition: The Origins of Logic.

Early Cognition: The Origins of Logic.

The variety of consequence, according to Bolzano

Contemporary historians of logic tend to credit Bernard Bolzano with the invention of the semantic notion, of consequence, a full century before Tarski. Nevertheless, Bolzano's work played no significant role in the genesis of modern logical semantics. The purpose of this paper is to point out three highly original, and still quite relevant themes in Bolzano's work, being a systematic study of possible types of inference, of consistency, as well as their meta-theory. There are certain analogies with Tarski's concerns here, although the main thrust seems to be different, both philosophically and technically. Thus, if only obliquely, we also provide some additional historical perspective on Tarski's achievement.

イランにおける論理学史研究

イランにおける論理学史研究

Apuleius and the Square of Opposition

Historians of logic are agreed that, although Aristotle stated the principal relations between the four types of categorical proposition, he did invent the heuristic diagram, traditionally known as the Square of Opposition, which maps those relations. But when it comes to the actual origin of the diagram, modern writers show some degree of uncertainty and even of confusion. The Kneales' are content to say that it is not to be found in Aristotle's text; a recent dictionary of philosophy2 appears to locate its origin in texts; many other writers merely apply the epithet 'traditional' to the figure, though often in contexts which would imply either a medieval or post-medieval origin. Bochefiski3 and Mark Sullivan4 correctly identify the first known occurrence of the diagram as being in the Latin handbook, conventionally titled HepL kpwqveias, from the Second Century A.D. and ascribed to Apuleius of Madaura. This rather neglected work, which will be referred to hereafter as P.H., has as its principal subjects the logic of categorical propositions and the theory of the assertoric syllogism, although its author also makes some adversions on Stoic logic. However, both Bochetiski and Sullivan reproduce, as the Apuleian Square of Opposition, a form of the diagram which contains non-Apuleian terminology and which runs beyond what is licensed by the Apuleian text although Sullivan admits both these points. The figures in BocheAiski and Sullivan are derived from that given by Thomas5 in his

Languages of similarity

Studying the "quantum logic", one could observe that logical structures, like a language with its syntax and semantics, a consequence operation, etc., can be directly extracted from quantum theory. This way of constructing a language has no precedent in the history of formal logic. The procedure of "taking a well-known physical theory and distilling its logic", as Finkelstein [5] calls it, seems now to be sufficiently developed to apply it beyond the scope of quantum mechanics. The main characteristic feature of this procedure is that, roughly speaking, it reconstructs a syntax from a semantics: we identify some semantical objects within quantum theory, and infer the syntax of the corresponding language. It is the reverse of the common trends in formal logic, where we look for a semantics of a given syntactical structure. The main concern of this work is to find, in the "quantum-logical" manner, languages related to a "mini-theory" of similarity. It seems to be the first application of the quantum "reading off" procedure to a nonquantum theory.' We are still close to the quantum case, as a special similarity structure underlies quantum theory, too. Our considerations can be thus seen as a test of the quantum "reading off" procedure. This study of logical aspects of the notion of similarity is also of interest because this notion appears in some variants of the Kripkian modal semantics.2 After introducing basic notions of the "mini-theory" of similarity and illustrating them by examples (Section 2), we discuss in Section 3 the problem of determining a similarity structure by a set of properties. It is demonstrated that one must use vague properties to do this. This result is of crucial importance; because of it the languages of similarity we obtain have to be multi-valued. A set of objects with a similarity relation over it, together with the set of properties determining this similarity, form a structure resembling to some extent the basic structure of quantum theory. It makes it possible to apply here the same procedure as in the quantum case in order to find a language of the similarity "theory".

English Logic in Italy inthe14thand15thCenturies. Acts of the 5thEuropeanSymposium onMedieval Logicand Semantics.Rome,10-14 November 1980, edited by Alfonso Maier, Napoli, Bibliopolis, 1982. (History of Logic, I.)

English Logic in Italy inthe14thand15thCenturies. Acts of the 5thEuropeanSymposium onMedieval Logicand Semantics.Rome,10-14 November 1980, edited by Alfonso Maier, Napoli, Bibliopolis, 1982. (History of Logic, I.)

Reflections of an ex-AHA member

Now that area health authorities are part of the history of the National Health Service, there may be a case for reflecting on what we can learn from their experience before completing the final burial rites. In my study stand three crammed box files: memorials to the three years I spent as a member of an AHA. What did I learn from this experience? And what are the implications for the future ? This paper attempts to draw some cautious conclusions about the role of authority members in the running of the NHS on the basis of my own three-year stint. It is, self-evidently, dangerous to extrapolate too recklessly from limited experience of one AHA. In particular, it is important to emphasise the special characteristics of my own AHA : Wiltshire. It lacked the sort of acute social and economic problems that afflict some inner cities; it did not mirror the political tensions generated by such problems; it had been fortunate enough to attract a highly competent team of chief officers who commanded the support and confidence of the members. authority's style reflected these characteristics. emphasis was on achieving consensus; at times the chairman had to make quite deliberate efforts to ensure that important issues were given a more than perfunctory discussion. Only rarely did the members vote, and then usually on matters that did not affect the AHA directly. For example, the question of whether or not the AHA should back legislation to make the wearing of seat belts compulsory aroused strong passions. But such passion was exceptional. To the extent that members felt strongly, it was usually about issues that united them: in particular, about what they saw as the region's insensitivity to the area's claims to extra resources and its rigidity in seeking to impose regional policies and plans. Overall, it would be difficult to conclude?on the basis of my short experience?that authority members played a large part in either formulating or executing policies. With some ex? ceptions, discussed below, their role tended to be reactive and concerned with the small print of local implementation rather than grand strategy. Nor can this be explained by Wiltshire's special characteristics: my experience was in line with other studies.1-3 Instead, my experience suggests that the relatively recessive role of authority members may be explained by some of the problems built into the role itself. And it is these problems that I shall explore. For, though AH As may now have disappeared, their abolition has not automatically solved the difficulties faced by the members of health authorities. And the experience of AHA members may, therefore, still have implications for the new district health authority members. first discovery I made as an AHA member, no doubt like all other new recruits, was the extraordinary difficulty of my role?even for someone like myself, with a professional interest in the NHS, who should in theory have come reasonably well equipped for the task. difficulties had little to do with the organisational structure of the NHS?the number of tiers and their relation to each other?but reflected the peculiar nature of health services. Being an authority member is a never-ending, often frustrating battle against history, ambiguity, and uncertainty in an environment of exceptional complexity. 1972 Grey Book on the management of the NHS4 defined the role of AHA members in ambitiously, and optimistically, comprehensive terms: The AHA will itself take all decisions on planning, and resource and control the performance of its officers. main role of the member turned out to be, however, to judge by my own experience, the ratification of decisions imposed by the logic of history and the organisational dynamic of the Service itself. In practice, most decisions about policy, planning, and resource allocation have been pre-empted by the past. At any one point in time the scope for taking strategic decisions is constrained. Becoming an authority member is rather like boarding a train: the passengers can decide where to get off, but they have no say in its destination. Specifically, most developments flow from decisions about the capital investment programme: so, inevitably, given the long lead time, authority members are the prisoners of past planning policies now embodied in concrete.