Review of Bruno de Finetti's 'Philosophical Lectures on Probability' (Springer 2008)
| Abstract | This posthumous work was produced by transcribing audio recordings of lectures that Bruno de Finetti gave at the National Institute for Advanced Mathematics in Rome in 1979. Alberto Mura attended the course, recorded the lectures, took notes and edited the resulting volume, which was first published in Italian in 1995. Hykel Hosni translated the lectures for this English edition, which appears in the Synthese Library series of volumes on epistemology, logic, methodology and philosophy of science. The book contains an introductory essay about de Finetti by Maria Carla Galavotti. Three of the twenty-two lectures and part of a fourth are lost, but the remaining lectures have many useful editorial comments. Moreover, interesting discussion between de Finetti and those attending the course is also included. So we have many people to thank for this important text. De Finetti wrote the following notice to advertise the course at the Institute: The course, with a deliberately generic title [‘On Probability’] will deal with the conceptual and controversial questions on the subject of probability: questions which it is necessary to resolve, one way or another, so that the development of reasoning is not reduced to a mere formalistic game of mathematical expressions or to vacuous and simplistic pseudophilosophical statements or allegedly practical claims. Since de Finetti was a key figure in the development of the conceptual foundations of probability, these lectures will be of great interest to philosophers of probability in particular, and to epistemologists and philosophers of mathematics and science in general. This new English edition is very welcome indeed. De Finetti is known as a champion of the strictly subjective interpretation of probability. According to this view, probabilities are to be construed as degrees of belief, and are thus defined in relation to an agent holding those beliefs. These 1 degrees of belief are subject to a rather weak normative constraint—coherence, which merely demands that degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of probability— but otherwise it is left up to the agent as to how to apportion her degrees of belief.. | |||||||||
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Similar books and articles Kyburg Jr (1973). Book Review:Probability, Induction and Statistics Bruno de Finetti. [REVIEW] Philosophy of Science 40 (3):451-.
Bruno de Finetti (1995). The Logic of Probability. Philosophical Studies 77 (1).
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Robert F. Nau (2001). De Finetti Was Right: Probability Does Not Exist. Theory and Decision 51 (2/4):89-124.
Alberto Mura (2009). Probability and the Logic of de Finetti's Trievents. In Maria Carla Galavotti (ed.), Bruno de Finetti Radical Probabilist. College Publications.
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