The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but (...) in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines. (shrink)

Preface to Volumes 1 and 2 Lorenz Krüger xv Introduction to Volume 1 Lorraine J. Daston 1 I Revolution 1 What Are Scientific Revolutions? Thomas S. Kuhn 7 2 Scientific Revolutions, Revolutions in Science, and a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930 I. Bernard Cohen 23 3 Was There a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930? Ian Hacking 45 II Concepts 4 The Slow Rise of Probabilism: Philosophical Arguments in the Nineteenth Century Lorenz Krüger 59 5 The Decline of the Laplacian Theory of Probability: (...) A Study of Stumpf, von Kries, and Meinong Andreas Kamlah 91 6 Fechner’s Indeterminism: From Freedom to Laws of Chance Michael Heidelberger 117 7 The Saint Petersburg Paradox 1713-1937 Gerard Jorland 157 8 Laplace and Thereafter: The Status of Probability Calculus in the Nineteenth Century Ivo Schneider 191 9 Emile Borel as a Probabilist Eberhard Knobloch 215 III Uncertainty 10 The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance 1650-1830 237 11 The Objectification of Observation: Measurement and Statistical Methods in the Nineteenth Century Zeno G. Swijtink 261 12 The Measurement of Uncertainty in Nineteenth-Century Social Science Stephen M. Stigler 287 IV Society 13 Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics Lorraine J. Daston 295 14 Decrire, Compter, Calculer: The Debate over Statistics during the Napoleonic Period Marie-Noelle Bourguet 305 15 Probability in Vital and Social Statistics: Quetelet, Farr, and the Bertillons Bernard-Pierre Lécuyer 317 16 Paupers and Numbers: The Statistical Argument for Social Reform in Britain during the Period of Industrialization Karl H. Metz 337 17 Lawless Society: Social Science and the Reinterpretation of Statistics in Germany, 1850-1880 Theodore M. Porter 351 18 Prussian Numbers 1860-1882 Ian Hacking 377 19 How Do Sums Count? On the Cultural Origins of Statistical Causality M. Norton Wise 395. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno—philosopher, cultural critic, sociologist, and music theorist—was one of the most important German intellectuals of the twentieth century. This concise, readable life is the first attempt to look at his philosophical and literary work in its essential political context. Central to Adorno’s intellectual development were his musical training, his father’s Jewish roots, and the rise of National Socialism in Germany, which forced him to emigrate to the United States. While in exile, he and Max Horkheimer wrote Dialectic (...) of Enlightenment, a bold attempt to illuminate the dark side of modernity, and on his own Adorno wrote a series of connected essays on the “culture industry”—his indictment of mass culture. A co-founder of the famous Frankfurt School, Adorno returned to head it after the war, assuming a key role in the intellectual life of postwar West Germany until his untimely death in 1969. Ja;ger’s biography sheds new light on many aspects of Adorno’s life and writings and on his relationships with such figures as Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

A reflection on everyday existence in the 'sphere of consumption of late Capitalism', this work is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece.

This book is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture - Adorno's finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights ...

These seventeen lectures given in 1963 focus largely on Kant, 'a thinker in whose work the question of morality is most sharply contrasted with other spheres of existence'. After discussing a number of the Kantian categories of moral philosophy, Adorno considers other, seemingly more immediate general problems, such as the nature of moral norms, the good life, and the relation of relativism and nihilism. In the course of the lectures, Adorno addresses a wide range of topics, including: theory and practice, (...) ethics as bad conscience, the repressive character, the problem of freedom, dialectics in Kant and Hegel, the nature of reason, the moral law as a given, psychoanalysis, the element of the Absurd, freedom and law, the Protestant tradition of morality, Hamlet, self-determination, phenomenology, the concept of the will, the idea of humanity, The Wild Duck, and Nietzsche's critique of morality. (shrink)

The eminent critic and scholar analyzes a wide range of topics, including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, jazz, the music of Bach, and museums.

"Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress." -- Cover, p. [4].

Discusses the experiments of Aristotle, William Beaumont, Robert Norman, Stephen Hales, Konrad Lorenz, Galileo, Robert Boyle, Theodoric of Freibourg, Louis Pasteur, Ernest Rutherford, A.A. Michelson, E.W. Morley, F. Jacob, E. Wollman, J.J. Gibson, A.L. Lavoisier, Humphrey Davy, J.J. Thomson, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, J.J. Berzelius, and Otto Stern.

This volume makes available in English for the first time Adorno’s lectures on metaphysics. It provides a unique introduction not only to metaphysics but also to Adorno’s own intellectual standpoint, as developed in his major work Negative Dialectics. Metaphysics for Adorno is defined by a central tension between concepts and immediate facts. Adorno traces this dualism back to Aristotle, whom he sees as the founder of metaphysics. In Aristotle it appears as an unresolved tension between form and matter. This basic (...) split, in Adorno’s interpretation, runs right through the history of metaphysics. Perhaps not surprisingly, Adorno finds this tension resolved in the Hegelian dialectic. Underlying this dualism is a further dichotomy, which Adorno sees as essential to metaphysics: while it dissolves belief in transcendental worlds by thought, at the same time it seeks to rescue belief in a reality beyond the empirical, again by thought. It is to this profound ambiguity, for Adorno, that the metaphysical tradition owes its greatness. The major part of these lectures, given by Adorno late in his life, is devoted to a critical exposition of Aristotle’s thought, focusing on its central ambiguities. In the last lectures, Adorno’s attention switches to the question of the relevance of metaphysics today, particularly after the Holocaust. He finds in metaphysical experiences, which transcend rational discourse without lapsing into irrationalism, a last precarious refuge of the humane truth to which his own thought always aspired. This volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in Adorno’s work and will be a valuable text for students and scholars of philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

La« théorie cellulaire», élaborée au XIXe siècle sous l'impulsion, entre autres chercheurs, de Lorenz Oken, Matthias Schleiden, Theodor Schwann et Rudolf Virchow, a profondément modifié la vision que l'Homme se faisait jusque-là de la vie, puisqu'elle affirmait que la cellule est l'unité organique constitutive de tous les êtres vivants et que tout être vivant est issu d'une cellule. L'observation d'un unicellulaire comme la paramécie montre, en effet, qu'une cellule doit être considérée comme une forme vivante intégrale puisqu'en se (...) nourrissant, en se développant, en se défendant et en se reproduisant elle manifeste le destin commun à tous les êtres vivants. Son espace vital, engendré par ses déplacements, est coextensif à ses besoins et donc à ses comportements. (shrink)

Introduction to Sociology distills decades of distinguished work in sociology by one of this century’s most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory ...

This short article aims to strengthen Hume's case against the rationality of believing in religious miracles by incorporating certain lessons borrowed from the growing literature on the history and psychology of magic tricks.

Aristotelian metaphysics is a change in the form of metaphysics, which seems to be extraneous to it but in reality co‐determines it in the most intimate way. Descartes’ Meditations are intellectual exercises that extend over six days. On almost every new day, a reference is made to the results or intermediary results of the previous day, or the spiritual experiences of the last days. This division into days, as well as the physical back‐references, mentioned in the First Meditation and repeated (...) in the Third, the repetitions, the monologue form, and other elements, point to the fact that Descartes’ Meditations must be understood within the tradition of philosophy in the sense of spiritual exercises. The knowledge of God must be considered as the highest stage of freedom. Descartes himself described the true path to the truth as the path a facilioribus ad difficiliora [from easier to more difficult things]. (shrink)

Three parts of philosophical papers concerned with works, matters and traditions, respectively, present ways of dealing methodically with problems that arise while having and articulating experience. The contents range from philosophy in Antiquity as well as Buddhist to existentialism and analytic philosophy, from relating science and art to the antagonism between freedom and justice. By reflecting on the particular steps of argument the papers become samples of dialogical philosophy with respect both to subject matter and means of procedure.