Probability has become one of the most characteristic con cepts of modern culture, and a 'probabilistic way of thinking' may be said to have penetrated almost every sector of our in tellectual life. However it would be difficult to determine an explicit list of 'positive' features, to be proposed as identifica tion marks of this way of thinking. One would rather say that it is characterized by certain 'negative' features, i. e. by certain at titudes which appear to be the negation of well ...

The two volumes to which this is apreface consist of the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on History and Philosophy of Science. The Conference was organized by the Joint Commission of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS) under the auspices of the IUHPS, the Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the Domus Galilaeana of Pisa, headed by Professor Vincenzo Cappelletti. Domus Galilaeana also served as the host institution, wit...

Mathematics is often considered as a body of knowledge that is essen tially independent of linguistic formulations, in the sense that, once the content of this knowledge has been grasped, there remains only the problem of professional ability, that of clearly formulating and correctly proving it. However, the question is not so simple, and P. Weingartner's paper (Language and Coding-Dependency of Results in Logic and Mathe matics) deals with some results in logic and mathematics which reve...

The topic to which this book is devoted is reductionism, and not reduction. The difference in the adoption of these two denominations is not, contrary to what might appear at first sight, just a matter of preference between a more abstract (reductionism) or a more concrete (reduction) terminology for indicating the same sUbject matter. In fact, the difference is that between a philosophical doctrine (or, perhaps, simply a philosophical tenet or claim) and a scientific procedure. Of course,...

This book is designed to explain the technical ideas that are taken for granted in much contemporary philosophical writing. Notions like 'denumerability', 'modal scope distinction', 'Bayesian conditionalization', and 'logical completeness' are usually only elucidated deep within difficult specialist texts. By offering simple explanations that by-pass much irrelevant and boring detail, Philosophical Devices is able to cover a wealth of material that is normally only available to specialists...

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who is considered to be the father of modern philosophy. Kant’s writings continue to influence the philosophy in many fields including metaphysics, ethics, and political theory. This edition of The Critique of Practical Reason includes a table of contents.

This book presents a philosophical approach to probability and probabilistic thinking, considering the underpinnings of probabilistic reasoning and modeling, which effectively underlie everything in data science. The ultimate goal is to call into question many standard tenets and lay the philosophical and probabilistic groundwork and infrastructure for statistical modeling. It is the first book devoted to the philosophy of data aimed at working scientists and calls for a new consideration ...

Interest in the metaphysics and logic of possible worlds goes back at least as far as Aristotle, but few books address the history of these important concepts. This volume offers new essays on the theories about the logical modalities (necessity and possibility) held by leading philosophers from Aristotle in ancient Greece to Rudolf Carnap in the twentieth century. The story begins with an illuminating discussion of Aristotle's views on the connection between logic and metaphysics, continu...

Adolf Reinach was one of the leading figures of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, and Husserl's first real co-worker. Although his writings are highly original and remarkably clear, Reinach's tragic death in the First World War prevented him from formulating a definitive statement of his phenomenology, leaving his name virtually unknown to all but a small circle.In his ground-breaking study, Judgment and Sachverhalt, DuBois shows how Reinach succeeds in dev...

I have been thinking about the philosophical issue of truth for more than two decades. It is one of several fascinating philosophical issues that motivated me to change my primary re ective interest to philosophy after receiving BS in mathem- ics in 1982. Some serious academic work in this connection started around the late eighties when I translated into Chinese a dozen of Donald Davidson’s representative essays on truth and meaning and when I assumed translator for Adam Morton who gave a...

Doing Worlds with Words throws light on the problem of meaning as the meeting point of linguistics, logic and philosophy, and critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of elucidating the nature of meaning by means of formal logic, model theory and model-theoretical semantics. The main thrust of the book is to show that it is misguided to understand model theory metaphysically and so to try to base formal semantics on something like formal metaphysics; rather, the book ...