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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
Isaiah Berlin
Bernard Berofsky
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Diodorus Cronus
Donald Davidson
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Herbert Feigl
John Martin Fischer
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Michael Frede
Carl Ginet
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
William King
Christine Korsgaard
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Leucippus
Michael Levin
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
James Martineau
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Paul E. Meehl
Alfred Mele
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Friedrich Nietzsche
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
H.A.Prichard
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
L. Susan Stebbing
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

Michael Arbib
Bernard Baars
John S. Bell
Charles Bennett
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Neils Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
Donald Campbell
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
E. H. Culverwell
Charles Darwin
Abraham de Moivre
Paul Dirac
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Paul Ehrenfest
Albert Einstein
Richard Feynman
Joseph Fourier
Michael Gazzaniga
GianCarlo Ghirardi
Nicolas Gisin
Thomas Gold
A.O.Gomes
Joshua Greene
Jacques Hadamard
Patrick Haggard
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
William Stanley Jevons
Pascual Jordan
Simon Kochen
Stephen Kosslyn
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
David Layzer
Benjamin Libet
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Henry Margenau
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
Jacques Monod
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Max Planck
Henri Poincaré
Adolphe Quételet
Jerome Rothstein
Erwin Schrödinger
Claude Shannon
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
B. F. Skinner
Henry Stapp
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
William Thomson (Kelvin)
John von Neumann
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Ernst Zermelo
 
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace

Pierre Simon Laplace is a giant in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Although much of his work had been done earlier by others (he rarely gives them any credit), his original contributions are a large part of his books on mathematics, probability, and celestial mechanics.

His Mécanique Céleste reworks Newton's Principia using the differential calculus. It contains the famous nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, first suggested by Emanuel Swedenborg and Immanuel Kant.

Laplace's several works on probability (Théorie des probabilités , Théorie analytique des probabilités , and Essai philosophique sur les probabilités) establish many of the techniques and results of statistics, including the method of least squares for assessing observational data, but more importantly they defend the idea of a priori probability that can be used to reason about future events.

In the introduction to the Essai, he extended an idea of Gottfried Leibniz which became famous as Laplace's Demon, a key vision of strict physical determinism. He said

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

Laplace worked out the mathematics for the binomial distribution. If p is the probability of a success and q = 1 - p the probability of failure, then the probability of k successes is

Pr(k) = (n!/(n - k)! k!)p(n - k)qk

Abraham de Moivre had derived this result in his The Doctrine of Chances (1738). It is sometimes called the de Moivre-Laplace Theorem.

Laplace emphasized his view that real chance did not exist by calling his work the "calculus of probabilities." With its connotation of approbation, probability was a more respectable term than chance, with its associations of gambling and lawlessness. For Laplace, the random outcomes were not predictable only because we lack the detailed information to predict. As did the ancient Stoics, Laplace explained the appearance of chance as the result of human ignorance. He said,

"The word 'chance,' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order."
The implication is that all chance events are driven by underlying laws that insure the observed statistics of the "normal distribution."

Pr(x) = (1/√(2π)) e-x2/2

This mathematical form seemed to explain the many new studies of social statistics in the nineteenth century. Most philosophers and scientists held the view that chance was simply the result of human ignorance as to the causes. That chance events must be determined by unknown causes was (mistakenly) justified by the lawful nature of their distribution.

This mistaken idea appears again in the late 18th century (Kant himself thought it proved phenomenal determinism) and the early 19th century (in the work of Joseph Fourier, Adolph Quételet, and Thomas Henry Buckle).

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