scholarly journals Why classic probability cannot be maintained

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gábor Szabó
Keyword(s):  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
Principle Of Indifference ◽  
Insufficient Reason ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Principle Of Insufficient Reason

Pierre Simon Laplace defines classic probability in his “Essai philosophique sur les probabilités” in 1814. According to Laplace, probability is the correlate of partial human knowledge. Laplace’s notion of probability rests on the idea that if there is no reason to believe one event is more likely to happen than the other, then the two events should be considered equally probable. This idea is the principle of insufficient reason defined by Jacob Bernoulli, most probably a counterpoint to Leibniz’ principle of sufficient reason. The principle of insufficient reason is called the principle of indifference by Keynes and it is known under this name in criticism. Laplace defines probability as the number of useful happenings for creating an event divided by the number of events equally probable. The paper traces three presuppositions of Laplace’s definition and fasifies them one by one to show that his definition of classic probability cannot be defended. The paper claims that because i. in a determinist world there are not only epistemic probabilities, ii. epistemic probabilities are not necessarily subjective and iii. the principle of indifference does not provide sufficient basis for analysing probability, the classic definition of probability cannot be argued for.

God

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Martin Lin
Keyword(s):  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
The Third ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Way

This chapter offers reconstructions of Spinoza’s four arguments for the existence of God. Among the lessons learned from these reconstructions is that, although Spinoza’s first argument is often described as ontological, it relies on many substantive premises that go beyond the definition of God and it is not vulnerable to standard objections to ontological arguments. Additionally, the second argument introduces Spinoza’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, and seeing how Spinoza applies it to the existence of God sheds light on how he understands both the PSR and causation and explanation more generally. The chapter concludes by arguing that the third and fourth arguments pave the way for Spinoza’s claim that, besides God, no substance can be or be conceived and consideration of them shows why Spinoza’s argument for monism does not beg the question against the orthodox Cartesian.

Baumgarten’s Rationalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Look
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter reconsiders the character of Baumgarten’s supposed place in the rationalist tradition by pointing out that the strict opposition usually thought to hold between rationalism, empiricism, and theologically based philosophies in the eighteenth century tends to obscure the complexity of much of the thought of this period. In particular, Look examines the historical context and substance of Baumgarten’s thought, focusing on the principle of sufficient reason and Baumgarten’s definition of philosophy, and shows how in various ways the Metaphysics seeks to unify strands from all three traditions.

What is Chemistry, for Kant?

Kant Yearbook ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bennett McNulty
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Chemical Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractKant’s preoccupation with architectonics is a characteristic and noteworthy aspect of his thought. Various features of Kant’s argumentation and philosophical system are founded on the precise definitions of the various subdomains of human knowledge and the derivative borders among them. One science conspicuously absent from Kant’s routine discussions of the organization of knowledge is chemistry. Whereas sciences such as physics, psychology, and anthropology are all explicitly located in the architectonic, chemistry finds no such place. In this paper, I examine neglected passages from Kant’s corpus as well as texts regarding chemistry that Kant himself read in order to unveil his views on the definition of chemistry and its relations with the other sciences. These considerations reveal chemistry to be the science that studies the changes of matter into new kinds. Yet Kant idiosyncratically believes that such a change requires an infinite division of matter, effected by chemical forces. Although this understanding of chemical change dovetails with Kant’s dynamical, continualist theory of matter, it implies that chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. Thus, although chemistry stands alongside empirical physics as an applied natural science in Kant’s architectonic, it remains a distinct, independent science.

scholarly journals Hegel’s logic as the exposition of god from the end of the world

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 852-874
Author(s):  
Jure Simoniti
Keyword(s):  
Social Impact ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
The Other ◽  
Logical Space ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
The World ◽  
The Absolute

The article attempts to reconstruct the logical space within which, at the beginning of Hegel?s Logic, ?being? and ?nothing? are entitled to emerge and receive their names. In German Idealism, the concept of ?being? is linked to the form of a proposition; Fichte grounds a new truth-value on the absolute thesis of the ?thetical judgement?. And the article?s first thesis claims that Hegel couldn?t have placed ?being? at the beginning of this great system, if the ground of its logical space had not been laid out by precisely those shifts of German Idealism that posited the ontological function of the judgement. At the same time, the abstract negation, the absence of a relation and sufficient reason between ?being? and ?nothing?, reveals a structure of an irreducibly dual beginning. The logical background of this original duality could be constituted by the invention of the ?transcendental inter-subjectivity? in German Idealism, manifested, for instance, in Hegel?s life-and-death struggle of two self-consciousnesses. The second thesis therefore suggests that ?being? and ?nothing? are elements of the logical space, established in concreto in a social situation of (at least) two subjects one of whom poses an affirmative statement and the other negates it abstractly. From here, one could draw out the coordinates of a sphere by the name of ?public? whose structure is defined by the invalidation of two basic laws of thought, the law of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. The article shows how only the statements capable of absorbing negation, of sustaining a co-existence of affirmation and its symmetrical, abstract negation, can climb the ladder of public perceptibility and social impact.

scholarly journals Readability Thresholds

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Luka Bekavac
Keyword(s):  
Energy Loss ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Gravity Assist ◽  
The Real ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
Definition Of

The unreadable and the illegible tend to be treated as the “other” of writing. Playing on one of the meanings of xenography – writing in a language unknown to the writer – this paper explores the possibility that the metaphorical “gravity assist” of literature, rather than engaging the resources of content and imagination, actually resides in the cognitively inaccessible layers of writing as a material phenomenon. If we accept Harman’s definition of realism as something that can’t be translated into human knowledge without energy loss, regions of unintelligibility in literary writing take on a completely different meaning, and appear as zones coinciding with the asemic material exteriority, equally unavailable to thought and mimesis. Writings of Thomas Ligotti (The Red Tower), Reza Negarestani (Cyclonopedia) and Mark Z. Danielewski (The Familiar) are examined in the light of various atypical formal devices they use to convey a certain “otherness,” introducing varying degrees of unreadability as a response to the “inscrutability of the Real itself” (Fisher) and enforcing new types of non-hierarchical distribution of agency between writer, reader and text.

Insufficient reason in the ‘new cosmological argument’

2001 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEVIN DAVEY ◽  
ROB CLIFTON
Keyword(s):  
Recent Article ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
Cosmological Argument ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
Insufficient Reason ◽  
The Way

In a recent article in this journal, Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss offer a new cosmological proof for the existence of God relying only on the Weak Principle of Sufficient Reason, W-PSR. We argue that their proof relies on applications of W-PSR that cannot be justified, and that our modal intuitions simply do not support W-PSR in the way Gale and Pruss take them to.

Spinoza’s “Ontological” Argument

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Argument ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
Definition Of

Proposition 11 of Part 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics states that God necessarily exists. Although his demonstration of the proposition is often said to constitute his ontological argument for the existence of God, and to report an essentially private “rational perception” of God’s existence, he provides four distinct “proofs” for the proposition. This chapter analyzes the four proofs and the relations among them. Like ontological arguments, they depend crucially on a definition of God that is intended, when grasped, to show that God necessarily exists; but like most cosmological arguments, they also depend crucially on a principle of sufficient reason. The last two proofs can be seen to address an objection, concerning the principle that substances cannot share attributes, that might otherwise be raised to the first two proofs.

“Not So Ridiculous”

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Davlat Dadikhuda
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
The Other ◽  
Causal Contribution ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

This chapter explicates a distinctive argument that Avicenna offers for the existence of nature as a causal power in bodies. In doing that, the author shows the argument has two main targets: the Aristotelian tradition on the hand, who thought that the existence of nature, as an intrinsic principle of movement, was self-evident, and the Ash ͑arite occasionalist theological tradition on the other, who were anti-realists about all creaturely efficacious power, locating all efficacy instead in an extrinsic transcendent agent. The argument draws on two key premises: a regularity of events thesis and a version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). Based on these two premises, Avicenna offers a response to the issue in a way that attempts to preserve something from both traditions. For it allows, with the Ash ͑aris, the causal involvement of a transcendent being in the production of some effect or range of effects from some body; and yet still maintains, against them and with the Aristotelians, that the effect must occur in virtue of some property of that body, where the property in question makes a real causal contribution to the effect’s occurrence. This amounts to a properly Avicennian account.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason: a Moral Argument

1996 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Mark T. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Indirect Evidence ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cosmological Argument ◽  
Moral Argument ◽  
Important Principle ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
Adequate Evidence

The Clarke/Rowe version of the Cosmological Argument is sound only if the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is true, but many philosophers, including Rowe, think that there is not adequate evidence for the principle of sufficient reason. I argue that there may be indirect evidence for PSR on the grounds that if we do not accept it, we lose our best justification for an important principle of metaethics, namely, the Principle of Universalizability. To show this, I argue that all the other justifications of the Principle of Universalizability on offer, including Richard Hare's, are inadequate.

Immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in positively stained frozen sections

1978 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-169
Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu
Keyword(s):  
Surface Tension ◽  
Water Surface ◽  
Thin Layers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Positive Staining ◽  
Frozen Sections ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ultrathin Frozen Sections ◽  
Definition Of

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).

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