Project (2014)

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

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).