MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Project (2014)

A Terrible Piece of Bad Metaphysics? The Tradition of Objective Probability in the Late-Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century

  • Lukas M Verburgt

The general aim of this project was to articulate the philosophical conditions of the transition from the non-mathematical definition to the mathematical formalization of "objective probability" in terms of a development from idealization to abstraction—and this by means of an investigation of the work of, among others, Robert Leslie Ellis (probability theory, symbolic algebra, Kantian epistemology), John Venn (probability theory, symbolic logic), David Hilbert (the "sixth problem," axiomatization of physics, general covariance), Richard von Mises (frequentism, logic, Machism, "real world" versus "set-theoretic" probability), and Andrei Kolmogorov/Aleksandr Khinchin ((semi-)intuitionism, measure-theory). 

Publications

Verburgt, L.M. (2013). Robert Leslie Ellis's work on philosophy of science and the foundations of probability theory. Historia Mathematica, 40(4), 423-454.

Verburgt, L.M. (2014). John Venn's hypothetical infinite frequentism. History and Philosophy of Logic, 35(3), 248-271.

Verburgt, L.M. (2014). Remarks on the idealist and empiricist interpretation of frequentism: Robert Leslie Ellis versus John Venn. Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 29(3), 184-195.

Verburgt, L.M. (2014). On Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin's 'Ideas of intuitionism and the struggle for a subject matter in contemporary mathematics'. [Under review]

Verburgt, L.M. (2014). John Venn on the foundations of symbolic logic. [Under review]