Caporetto

One hundred years ago the terrible WWI Battle of Caporetto began (on Oct. 24). The battle was named for a town that is now in Slovenia (and is called 'Kobarid' in Slovene) and that used to be in Yugoslavia, in Italy, in Austria-Hungary, etc.

Caporetto was the 12th Battle of the Isonzo, the last in a series of costly and generally poorly planned attacks in difficult mountain terrain.

It was a cataclysmic defeat for the Italians that nearly knocked them out of the War. In the cultural memory, what the Somme is for the British and Canadians, and what Verdun is for the French and Germans, Caporetto is for the Italians. Technically, while Italy lost at Caporetto, the British won the Somme and the French won at Verdun, but these last two battles nonetheless signify for all parties involved the War's senselessness and catastrophic waste.

One of the young men on the Italian side of this battle was Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (aka Pope John XXIII), who was a chaplain (according to his German Wikipedia entry). Among the Italian soldiers to be killed at Caporetto was the mathematician Eugenio Elia Levi.

Like other major WWI engagements, Caporetto's cultural ramifications reverberated for many years after the War and include important literary works by people who were swept up in the battle or its aftermath. In English there's Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which describes the Italian retreat and derives partly from the author's experiences with a volunteer ambulance service in Italy about six months after Caporetto.

In Italian, there's Curzio Malaparte's Viva Caporetto! (for which I can't find an English trans.). Emilio Lussu's memoir, Un anno sull'Altipiano, covers the battle and has been translated into English (as A Soldier on the Southern Front). Novelist and engineer Carlo Emilio Gadda was taken prisoner at Caporetto, an experience which he describes in his Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (or War and Prison Diary, unavailable in English). While a POW, Gadda befriended two other literary prisoners from Caporetto, Ugo Betti and Bonaventura Tecchi. I don't know if these last two authors published anything explicitly about their WWI experiences.

Umberto Rossi has written about Caporetto's traces in Italian literary culture.

Rai has a short video about the battle.

The Italians faced an attacking force of Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Erwin Rommel led part of the German group. The Hapsburg troops included many Slovenes, Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, and Hungarians. Among the Hapsburg officers at Caporetto were Ludwig von Mises and the composer Viktor Ullmann, who survived WWI but was murdered at Auschwitz Oct. 18, 1944.

French and central European philosophers in WWI

This war has indeed wrought great havoc in scholarship. (Edward P. Buffet, Monist 26, no. 2 [April, 1916], 'Karl Eugen Neumann', p. 319)

In addition to Étienne Gilson and Pierre Rousselot, another French philosopher who served in WWI is Émile Bréhier. Although he was 40 years old in 1916, he was at the Battle of Verdun, as a result of which his left arm was amputated (in October, 1916). Martial Gueroult also was in the army, as was the historian Marc Bloch.

On the German side, in addition to Emil Lask and Adolf Reinach (noted in an earlier post), there is Heinrich Friedemann, who had studied philosophy at Marburg with Paul Natorp and belonged to one of Stefan George's circles. Friedemann had published a book on Plato (Platon; seine Gestalt, 1914) and was, when the War began, habilitating at Heidelberg with Friedrich Gundolf. On Feb. 22, 1915, Friedemann was killed in action.

Another member of George's circle who was killed in the War is Norbert von Hellingrath. He was a Munich philologist who is known for having re-discovered Hölderlin's poetry.

From Ernst Robert Curtius's letter to Friedrich Gundolf (November, 1914):

What is horrifying about modern war is that human beings do not fight against other human beings, but against gruesome impersonal machines. Land mines, machine guns, artillery fire: that is the anonymous horror on which every idealistic perception of the war must founder. (quoted from Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle, [Cornell University Press, 2002], p. 530)

Otto Dix - Stormtroopers advancing under a gas attack (1924)

There was also Wilhelm Metzger, who taught at Leipzig. He was a prominent Schelling scholar and had published Die Epochen der Schellingschen Philosophie von 1795 bis 1802, Ein problemgeschichtlicher Versuch. He was drafted into the army and sent to the western front. You will have to excuse my extremely weak German-language abilities, but if I interpret correctly a passage from Peter Hoerres' book (Krieg der Philosophen: die deutsche und britische Philosophie im Ersten Weltkrieg, 2004), Metzger died in 1916 of cancer.

Outside of philosophy but doing work of interest in the philosophy of art, there was Fritz Burger, an art history professor in Munich who was killed on May 22, 1916. Born in 1877, Burger was almost as old as Bréhier.

Robert Staiger, a privatdozent in art history at Göttingen and Felix Klein's son-in-law, was killed in action in August, 1914. Another Göttingen privatdozent who was killed in the War, and who was close to Klein, was the mathematician Wilhelm Behrens.

I learned of Behrens from this incredible source: Placing World War I in the History of Mathematics, by David Aubin and Catherine Goldstein (2013). See also the collection edited by Aubin and Goldstein: The War of Guns and Mathematics, ed. David Aubin and Catherine Goldstein (American Mathematical Society, 2014)

Here's a quotation from Arthur Bauer's piece in the July, 1916 issue of Revue Philosophiques de la France et de l'Étranger. Treat my following attempt at translation more as a paraphrase. According to Bauer, in extended periods of peace, for philosophers who do not attend sufficiently to history,

Humanity is in a state of constant progress and moves ... towards the ultimate end of its evolution: an altruism so natural and so powerful that everyone, forgetting his own interests, would serve his neighbor from inexhaustible reserves of charity. ... The terrible shock of current events wakes from their dream the most obstinate sleepers. By the light of howitzers that ... destroy whole battalions, illusions vanish, and reality appears in a relief so striking that no one can mistake it. (Bauer, 'Le role de la Fôrce' Revue Philosophiques de la France et de l'Étranger 82 [1916], p. 44)

In the Austro-Hungarian forces, in addition to Wittgenstein, philosopher Ernst Mally was in the front lines. Vienna-Circle mathematician Hans Hahn was wounded in the Isonzo region.

There was also a philosophy student and poet, Franz Janowitz, who was killed in 1917 in the Isonzo area. Janowitz, a friend of Franz Werfel's, was from Prague. His poetry was admired by Max Brod and Karl Kraus. He was studying philosophy in Vienna when the War began. One of his older brothers, Hans Janowitz (also a war vet), co-wrote the script for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Jerzy Żuławski

Photo source.

Jerzy Żuławski joined the Polish forces that fought on the Austro-Hungarian side. Żuławski had studied philosophy with Richard Avenarius in Switzerland. The product of that work was a dissertation called The Problem of Causality in Spinoza, which was the basis for a popular-philosophy book on Spinoza that Żuławski later published in Polish (Benedykt Spinoza: człowiek i dzieło, 1902). Żuławski translated several works of German philosophy into Polish. He is now known chiefly for his science-fiction books, especially his Lunar Trilogy (or Moon Trilogy). Stanisław Lem read these books when he was young and continued to admire the first book of the trilogy (The Silver Globe) later in life. Here's a 1985 item that Lem wrote about Żuławski's work. A film version of The Silver Globe was made by Żuławski's grand-nephew Andrzej Żuławski in 1976. The Lunar Trilogy sounds interesting. One of its themes was the transposition of events from the remote past into the language of mythology; the distant historical events in the novels concern the formation of a colony on the moon. While it has been translated into several languages, The Silver Globe hasn't been rendered in English. In WWI, Jerzy Żuławski worked mainly behind the battle front. He died in 1915 from an illness that he caught while visiting the front line.

From F. C. S. Schiller's review of John Dewey's book German Philosophy and Politics:

[The War] revealed that the actual world was a very different thing from the cosmic order they [philosophers] had constructed in their minds....Even though the rational order of human affairs was shattered before their eyes and the belief that thought controls man's feelings and determines his acts should have been among the first of the illusions swept away in the wreckage of the war, they insisted on finding ideal reasons to which to attribute the catastrophe.' (Schiller, Mind 25, no. 98 (Apr., 1916): 250)

Other philosophy students who served in the War and who achieved some distinction as novelists or poets include:

Miloš Crnjanski -- a Serb in the Austro-Hungarian army who wrote the The Journal of Carnojevic, which was recently produced as a play in Belgrade;

Camil Petrescu -- a Romanian who was wounded and taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians;

Milutin Bojić -- a poet in the Serbian army who died in May, 1917;

Sima Pandurović -- another poet in the Serbian army, Pandurović was taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians and survived the War.

Upddate (April 12): Slobodan Perovic has brought to my attention the Serbian philosopher Branislav Petronijević, who was a friend of Bertrand Russell's. (Thanks to Slobodan for those two links.)

Finally, here's an article by Nil Santiáñez (of St. Louis University) comparing Ernst Jünger's WWI writing with that of communist author Adam Scharrer; the article is called 'Ernst Jünger and Adam Scharrer: Two Global Views of the Great War'.

A gathering of the past -- weekend links

Professors & 4th-year graduates of philosophy at Lviv University (1904)

Source. Antoni Łomnicki is standing 3rd from left. (He was killed by Germans in the Massacre of the Lviv Professors.) Here's an article (pdf) about the people in the pic. Seated at the right is physicist and mathematician Marian Smoluchowski.

Anthea Bell's translation of Friedrich Torberg's Young Gerber is out from Pushkin Press (an excellent publisher whose website is not excellent). Here are two reviews. The book is about a tragedy in an Austrian school.

Speaking of which, Duncan Richter has a couple of posts on Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless. The novel was also the springboard for some reflections on value and culture.

Mr. Waggish has an essay on Musil's Man Without Qualities.

An interview with Susan Bernofsky, conducted while she was translating Gotthelf's Black Spider. David Auerbach (aka Mr. Waggish) says via Twitter that the book's release date is Oct. 8. It's strange that the NYRB site has no info about the book (neither does their Tumblr). The book (as Mr. Auerbach says) is on Amazon. Is it just me, or does the right half of the face on the cover look like Margaret Atwood?

Bookslut's review of Frierich Reck's Diary of a Man in Despair. It's also reviewed at the Guardian, by Common Reader, Futile Preoccupations, and Mookse and Gripes. This time, NYRB does have a site for the book. Reck, aka Friedrich Percival Reck-Malleczewen, died in Dachau. Here's a lengthy piece on him in German.

A review of Eduard Habsburg(-Lothringen)'s novel, Lena in Waldersbach.

Webern is 3rd from right

Source.

From David Wilson's review of Alain Badiou's Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy: 'Badiou’s bombast finally testifies in defense of Wittgenstein. Not that Badiou admits that Wittgenstein might be right. But this uncharitable and incomprehensible critique shows it. For silence would say so much more.'

Wuthering Expectations has several posts on Austrian writers, on Bernhard, Broch, Hofmannsthal, and Stifter (twice).

On the death of Anton Webern.

On James Joyce in Trieste.

Here are some nice old and new photos of the country houses that Patrick Leigh Fermor came across in Transylvania and Fermor's postcard from Cluj.

Neglected Books Page has an entry on You Still Have Your Head, a book by Franz Schoenberner.

Review of a newly translated French biography of Émile Durkheim.

Llosa on why Proust is important for everyone.

A podcast of John Marenbon on Boethius.

This strikes me as depressing. The Journal of Happiness Studies published this paper, 'Arthur’s advice: comparing Arthur Schopenhauer’s advice on happiness with contemporary research'. According to the Abstract, 'We summarize [Schopenhauer's] recommendations and compare these with conditions for happiness as observed in present day empirical research. Little of the advice appears to fit current research on conditions for happiness. Following Schopenhauer’s advice would probably make us unhappier, even if we had the same neurotic personality.' It's open access.

City of Lions -- Lemberg, Lwów, and Lviv

Akademicki Square, Lemberg

(Source)
The western Ukrainian city of Lviv has an impressive and complex legacy. It began the 20th-Century as Lemberg, an Austro-Hungarian outpost in the eastern reaches of the Habsburg domains. Between the world wars it was Lwów, a city in the southeastern corner of Poland. After WWII it was Lvov near the western frontier of the Soviet Union. Since 1991, it has been Lviv near the western edge of Ukraine.

Ethnic diversity was long a hallmark of the city. By the middle of the 1500's, five ethnic groups each accounted for at least 5% of Lviv's population. These groups were Polish, Ruthenian (western Ukrainian), German, Jewish, and Armenian. [Source: 'Lviv: a Multicultural City Through the Centuries' [pdf] by Yaroslav Hrytsak.] The city's environs included many Ruthenian, Jewish, and German (inc. Mennonite) villages. Here are several old maps of the city.

In its Habsburg days, Lemberg took shape as a 'little Vienna'. It was the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian crownland called (rather grandly) the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. As a provincial capital, Lemberg became a home for some lesser members of the Habsburg bureaucracy. For instance, Arthur Edler von Mises, an official in the Austrian state railway, spent part of his professional life in Lemberg. Both his famous sons, Ludwig and  Richard, were born there. So was Alexius von Meinong, whose father was a major general in the army. And then there's Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, born in Lemberg in 1836. His father was the chief of police.

Like the Viennese, the residents of Lemberg (Leopolitans) invested much in their university, a respectable, primarily undergraduate school and 'feeder' to the graduate and professional programs in Vienna. Lemberg University, which became Jan Kazimierz University in the interwar years, was the initial home of the Lwow/Warsaw School of logicians and philosophers. The members of this school who spent the most time in Lwów between the wars were Kazimierz Twardowski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Other members of the school were there in their student days. That includes Jan Łukasiewicz, who was born and habilitated in Lemberg (his father was an army captain).

Łukasiewicz worked with the Lvov mathematicians, an impressive group whose members were based at the city's main university and at the local polytechnic. These mathematicians followed the Viennese habit of working and socializing at a café. Their favourite hangout was the Scottish café (in Akademicki Square), where they would write their mathematical problems and solutions on the marble tables. Here's a nice description of them and their café. Among the mathematicians in question were Stefan Banach, Wladyslaw Orlicz, and the Lemberg natives Stanislaw Ulam and Stanislaw Mazur.

The Scottish Café (Szkocka Café)

The medical sciences were also well represented at Jan Kazimierz University. Researchers there included Jakub Parnas, Rudolf Weigl, Boleslaw Popielski, and Ludwig Fleck. The last two were born in Lemberg. Also, the first female physician in Austria-Hungary had her practice in Lviv (though she trained in Zurich).

Other distinguished mathematicians, scientists and engineers who hailed from Lemberg were Andrzej Mostowski, Alfred James Lotka, Stefan Bryla, and Maurice Goldhaber.

Lviv natives who distinguished themselves outside the mathematical and physical sciences include Solomon Buber (whose grandson Martin spent ten years of his childhood in Lemberg), Nahum Glatzer, Leopold Staff, Stanislaw Lem, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski (one of whose poems is 'To Go to Lvov'), Ivan Franko, and Józef Wittlin (whose 1946 memoir of life in Lvov has been translated into German and Spanish but not English).

While the Ruthenians tended to live in the rural areas around the city, there were several Ruthenian Leopolitans besides Ivan Franko who distinguished themselves in the literary and other arts: Vasyl Shchurat, Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Ivan Trush, Stanyslav Lyudkevych, and the opera divas Olena Kulchytska and Solomiya Krushelnitska. Finally, there's Lubka Kolessa, an excellent Ukrainian pianist who emigrated to Canada.

A diverse university town with flourishing arts and sciences, philosophy and opera -- Lviv was a very civilized little city. But here civilization met the depths of savagery. As James Meek has said, 'Few places have been the nexus of as much evil as Lviv station.' Lviv lay in the bloodlands. It experienced the Holocaust and was only a little to the west of where the Holodmor occurred in the early 1930's. (It is alleged that a 'lesser known chapter of the Holodmor' happened in Lviv in the late 1940's).

But violence descended on Lemberg before the horrors of the 1930's and 40's. In the roughly twenty-five years following 1913, there were at least four battles named after the city. There were several battles in Lemberg's environs in 1914, when the Russians took the city, followed by the Battle of Lemberg (1915), when the Austro-Hungarians and Germans took it back.

Russian POW's in Lemberg (1915)

Bavarian King enters Lemberg with victorious troops (1915)

The end of WWI brought only more violence. Amid the collapse of the Habsburg order there was a pogrom near the end of 1918, which happened during the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-19), which featured another Battle of Lemberg (1918). Then there was the Polish-Soviet War, which included a Battle of Lwów (1920). There was another Battle of Lwów (1939), after which the Soviets took possession of Lvov. The NKVD jailed their Ruthenian political opponents and murdered many of them before evacuating in the face of the German invasion in June, 1941. There were pogroms in 1941 and an uprising against the Germans in 1944.

Jan Kazimierz University and the nearby polytechnic were targets of the violence. In July, 1941, twenty-five Lviv professors were murdered in the Wulka hills by the Nazis. The victims included the mathematicians Stanisław Ruziewicz, Kazimierz Bartel, Antoni Łomnicki and Włodzimierz Stożek (whose two sons were also among the victims). The law professor Roman Longchamps de Bérier, who had been the rector of the university, was killed with his three sons. A descendant of another victim, the economist Henryk Korowicz, has a post about the massacre (at which I found the Nazi newsreel posted below). Later in the war, the following Lvov mathematicians were killed by the Germans: Juliusz Pawel Schauder, Herman (aka Henryk) Auerbach, Moses Jacob, Stanislaw Saks, and Max Eidelheit (who is listed among the casualties in Ingarden's memorial to Schauder).

Another mathematician, Stefan Kaczmarz, was killed by the Soviets. So, too, was Stanisław Głąbiński, a Polish government official who had earlier been the rector and dean of the law school. He was killed in 1941 by the NKVD in Lubyanka Prison. 

Before WWII, Lwów's population included 150 000 Poles, almost 110 000 Jews, and 80 000 Ruthenians. Only a few hundred Jews remained in Lvov at the end of the war. During and after the war, the Soviets deported the Poles westwards across the new Polish-Soviet border. As a result, by 1947, the city had lost more than two-thirds of its pre-WWII population.

To quote from a New York Times article that was written during the Soviet occupation in 1939, 'Lemberg is a symbol of what is happening because it stood so long as an outpost of the eastward push of western civilization and now becomes a sign of a push in the opposite direction.' ['Break-up of eastern Europe is symbolized in Lwow' by Anne O'Hare McCormick (Sept. 25, 1939).] The Times reporter here presents a trope that had been given life by Poles and other westerners, who saw Lemberg not simply as a frontier town between countries or kingdoms or even empires but, rather, as a town on a fault line between civilizations. (The trope had been promoted especially by Soma Morgenstern, an accomplished author who lived in Lemberg before WWI.)

After WWII, many of the deported Poles moved to Wroclaw. They were followed in 1956 by Lwów's monument to the Polish poet Aleksander Fredro. In his book Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions, Gregor Thum describes the transfer of the Fredro memorial (p.298). It used to stand opposite the Scottish café. In fact, the picture at the top of this post is from the perspective of someone standing in front of Fredro's statue. The statue was replaced in Lviv by a statue of the Ukrainian hero Mykhaylo Hrushevskyi. Fredro's statue was moved from Lwów (now Lviv) to Breslau (now Wroclaw), where it found a new home on a site that had previously been occupied by an equestrian statue of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. The re-named cities incorporated new memorials, though none of the memories or identities were really new; they were just shifted or transposed according to Stalin's wishes.

One of the strengths of the law department at Jan Kazimierz University was international law. Philippe Sands wrote a paper about some of the more accomplished alumni of that law program. The alumni include Louis B. Sohn, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin. The last two made important contributions to the Nuremberg War Trials as well as to the UN's Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Along with them, the Leopolitans Simon Wiesenthal and Philip Friedman also survived the savagery that erupted in Lviv. They, too, worked for truth and justice, ensuring that civilization would have the last word.

Wittgenstein and some German novelists

I linked in my previous post to some items that connect Wittgenstein to literary themes.

Duncan Richter has a post about Wittgenstein and Kafka. In the comments to that post, there are recommendations of some additional work that involves Kafka and Wittgenstein. Richter refers to Rebecca Schuman's paper, ‘"Unerschütterlich": Kafka’s Proceß, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the Law of Logic', which has now appeared in The German Quarterly. I know of one fictional work that puts Kafka and Wittgenstein together (very briefly). It's a story by Guy Davenport called The Aeroplanes at Brescia.

Last fall, Ben Ware published 'Ethics and the Literary in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' in the Journal for the History of Ideas. Ware there 'explores the connections between the literary and the ethical in the book,' and argues that 'Wittgenstein hoped to achieve a practical rather than cognitive transformation in his readers' lives.'

On another German lit front that involves Wittgenstein, Gwyneth Cliver's 2008 dissertation, Musil, Broch, and the mathematics of modernism, has two chapters on Wittgenstein.

Martin Gardner, a 'whys' man

Martin Gardner died on May 22 at the age of 95. He wrote the 'Mathematical Games' column in Scientific American for 35 years and was an accomplished critic of pseudo-science.

I first became aware of Gardner by way of his work on C. L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), especially as evidenced in his Annotated Alice (see also his Universe in a Handkerchief). Of all Gardner's works, though, my favourite one is his Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (wise indeed). Here's a review from the New Criterion (where Gardner himself published several reviews).

If philosophy begins in wonder, then Whys is a great entryway into philosophy. The index is loaded with names like Wittgenstein, Russell, Reichenbach, Carnap, Rudolf Otto, Tillich, Barth and F. R. Tennant, but Gardner never introduces the philosophy cold (in textbook fashion). Instead, he makes the philosophical questions seem like the most natural and enticing explorations on which to embark. He works up to this effect by way of more literary reflections, sometimes making his approach through passages from children's literature.

For this purpose, Carroll and L. Frank Baum (author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz) seem to have been Gardner's favourites. I particularly like Gardner's use of an episode from The Marvelous Land of Oz in connection with the concept of the numinous (on p. 342 of Whys). In this episode, Tip is startled when the wooden Saw-Horse comes to life. Gardner notes that the Saw-Horse is even more startled, rolling its eyes and "taking a first wondering view of the world in which he had now so important an existence" (Gardner quoting Baum, p. 342). Gardner then asks whether this (and other) quotations have not stirred in the reader "a similar sense of surprise and wonder." "Have you never," he continues, "felt amazed to find yourself not only living in an Ozzy world but, more incredibly, aware of the fact that you are alive?"

It was in Whys that Gardner announced his 'philosophical theism'. He later characterized himself as "a mystic in the Platonic sense."

I have found two nice blog tributes that focus on Whys, one by Julia Galef and one by William M. Briggs (from whom I've learned that Gardner studied at Chicago with Rudolf Carnap).

One of the best on-line resources concerning Gardner can be found at the Cambridge University Press blog, which includes a 5-part interview from 2008.

Here are several obituaries and tributes: the Guardian, the NY Times, the Telegraph, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Lewis Carroll Society, Discover, the Skeptical Inquirer, one by James Randi, one by Roger Kimball, a video clip at BoingBoing, and several items at Scientific American (inc. a contribution by Douglas Hofstadter).

Here's an older article from the Wall Street Journal (last April 2) and an interview of Gardner by Alex Bellos.

Update (May 26, 2010): More tributes to Gardner are being tracked here (in English & Spanish).

Dodgson's math in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, math lecturer and logician.

Melanie Bayley wrote a couple of articles, one in New Scientist (behind a paywall) and the other in the NY Times, in which she discerns a mathematical satire in Alice. I first heard of her argument in Boing Boing, and it has received coverage elsewhere. Her claims have won agreement in some quarters but not in others (though she offers a rebuttal in the comments). [Correction (May 26, 2010): Peter Cameron, to whose comments the last link of the preceding sentence links, notes that he was not rejecting Dr. Bayley's hypothesis but merely reflecting on it.]

Dodgson wrote some works of popular math (pdf) and developed something called 'Dodgson condensation' (pdf). Robin Wilson's book, Lewis Carroll in Numberland, is a biography that focuses on Dodgson's mathematical efforts. There's also a book by Bernard Patten on the logic in Alice.

Update (March 24, 2010): NPR has coverage of Bayley's thesis. From the comments there I learned that Bayley cites the work of Helena Pycior as having introduced similar interpretive claims in the 1980's.

Update (May 26, 2010): Here's a piece on Dodgson by emeritus Oxford philosopher, J. R. Lucas.