Wilson John Cook (1849–1915), English logician, an Oxford realist. Cook Wilson studied with T. H. Green before becoming Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and leading the Oxford reaction against the then entrenched absolute idealism. More influential as a teacher than as a writer, his major work, Statement and Inference, was posthumously reconstructed from drafts of papers, philosophical correspondence, and an extensive set of often inconsistent lectures for his logic courses. A staunch critic of mathematical logic, Cook Wilson conceived of logic as the study of thinking, an activity unified by the fact that thinking either is knowledge or depends on knowledge. He claimed that knowledge involves apprehending an object that in most cases is independent of the act of apprehension and that knowledge is indefinable without circularity, views he defended by appealing to common usage. Many of Cook Wilson’s ideas were disseminated by H. W. B. Joseph (1867–1944), especially in his Introduction to Logic (1906). Rejecting ‘symbolic logic,’ Joseph attempted to reinvigorate traditional logic conceived along Cook Wilsonian lines. To do so he combined a careful exposition of Aristotle with insights drawn from idealistic logicians. Besides Joseph, Cook Wilson decisively influenced a generation of Oxford philosophers including Prichard and Ross. J.W.A.