Henry E Kyburg Jr Isaac Levi

The aim of this series is to inform both professional philosophers and a larger readership (of social and natural scientists, methodologists, mathematicians, students, teachers, publishers, etc.) about what is going on, who's who, and who does what in contemporary philosophy and logic. PROFILES is designed to present the research activity and the results of already outstanding personalities and schools and of newly emerging ones in the various fields of philosophy and logic. There are many Festschrift volumes dedicated to various philosophers. There is the celebrated Library of Living Philosophers edited by P. A. Schilpp whose format influenced the present enterprise. Still they can only cover very little of the contemporary philosophical scene. Faced with a tremendous expansion of philosophical information and with an almost frightening division oflabor and increas ing specialization we need systematic and regular ways of keeping track of what happens in the profession. PROFILES is intended to perform such a function. Each volume is devoted to one or several philosophers whose views and results 'are presented and discussed. The profiled philosopher(s} will summarize and review his (their) own work in the main fields of signifi cant contribution. This work will be discussed and evaluated by invited contributors. Relevant historical and/or biographical data, an up-to-date bibliography with short abstracts of the most important works and, whenever possible, references to significant reviews and discussions will also be included.

In this companion volume to Warrant: The Current Debate, Alvin Plantinga develops an original approach to the question of epistemic warrant; that is what turns true belief into knowledge. He argues that what is crucial to warrant is the proper functioning of one's cognitive faculties in the right kind of cognitive environment. Although this book is in some sense a sequel to its companion volume, the arguments do not presuppose those of the first book and it stands alone as a stimulating contribution to epistemology.

For scholars working on almost any aspect of American thought, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America presents an indispensable reference work. Selecting over 700 figures from the Dictionary of Early American Philosophers and the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, this condensed edition includes key contributors to philosophical thought. From 1600 to the present day, entries cover psychology, pedagogy, sociology, anthropology, education, theology and political science, before these disciplines came to be considered distinct from philosophy. Clear and accessible, each entry contains a short biography of the writer, an exposition and analysis of his or her doctrines and ideas, a bibliography of writings and suggestions for further reading. Featuring a new preface by the editor and a comprehensive introduction, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia to Philosophers in America includes 30 new entries on twenty-first century thinkers including Martha Nussbaum and Patricia Churchland. With in-depth overviews of Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Noah Porter, Frederick Rauch, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, this is an invaluable one-stop research volume to understanding leading figures in American thought and the development of American intellectual history.

The essays in this volume contribute substantially to the understanding of Isaac Levi's work.

Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence contains the proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence held at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, on July 9-11, 1993. The papers focus on methods of reasoning and decision making under uncertainty as applied to problems in artificial intelligence (AI) and cover topics ranging from knowledge acquisition and automated model construction to learning, planning, temporal reasoning, and machine vision. Comprised of 66 chapters, this book begins with a discussion on causality in Bayesian belief networks before turning to a decision theoretic account of conditional ought statements that rectifies glaring deficiencies in classical deontic logic and forms a sound basis for qualitative decision theory. Subsequent chapters explore trade-offs in constructing and evaluating temporal influence diagrams; normative engineering risk management systems; additive belief-network models; and sensitivity analysis for probability assessments in Bayesian networks. Automated model construction and learning as well as algorithms for inference and decision making are also considered. This monograph will be of interest to both students and practitioners in the fields of AI and computer science.

The volume is a collection of essays about prominent Polish 20th century philosophers of science and scientists who were concerned with problems in the philosophy of science. The contribution made by Polish logicians, especially those from the Lvov-Warsaw School, like Łukasiewicz, Kotarbiński, Czeżowski or Ajdukiewicz, is already well known. One of the aims of the volume is to offer a broader perspective. The papers collected here are devoted to the work of such philosophers as Zawirski, Metallmann, Dąmbska, Mehlberg, Szaniawski and Giedymin as well as to the work of such scientists as Smoluchowski, Fleck, Infeld and Chyliński. The introduction to the volume, written by the editor and Jacek Jadacki, presents an overview of the history of the Polish philosophy of science from the foundation of the Cracow Academy (in 1364) to the present.

A compilation of selected papers presented at the 1989 Charles S. Pierce International Congress Interest in Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is today worldwide. Ernest Nagel of Columbia University wrote in 1959 that "there is a fair consensus among historians of ideas that Charles Sanders Peirce remains the most original, versatile, and comprehensive philosophical mind this country has yet produced." The breadth of topics discussed in the present volume suggests that this is as true today as it was in 1959. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Harvard Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and the United States. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989, and concluded on the 10th—Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. The present volume is a compilation of selected papers presented at that Congress. The philosophy of science and its logic are themes in the work of Charles Peirce that have been of greatest interest to scholars. Peirce was himself a physical scientist. He worked as an assistant at the Harvard Astronomical Observatory from 1869 to 1872 and made a series of astronomical observations there from 1872 to 1875. Solon I. Bailey says of these observations, "The first attempt at the Harvard Observatory to determine the form of the Milky Way, or the galactic system, was made by Charles S. Peirce....The investigation was of a pioneer nature, founded on scant data." Peirce also made major contributions in fields as diverse as mathematical logic and psychology. C. I. Lewis has remarked that "the head and font of mathematical logic are found in the calculus of propositional functions as developed by Peirce and Schroeder." Peirce subsequently invented, almost from whole cloth, semiotics - the science of the meaning of signs. Ogden and Richards, the British critics, say that "by far the most elaborate and determined attempt to give an account of signs and their meanings is that of the American logician C. S. Peirce, from whom William James took the idea and the term Pragmatism, and whose Algebra of Dyadic Relations was developed by Schroeder."