Jesuit Probabilistic Logic between Scholastic and Academic Philosophy

0508404 - FLÚ 2020 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Hanke, Miroslav
Jesuit Probabilistic Logic between Scholastic and Academic Philosophy.
History and Philosophy of Logic. Roč. 40, č. 4 (2019), s. 355-373. ISSN 0144-5340. E-ISSN 1464-5149
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA17-12408S
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : probabilistic logic * logical validity * epistemic logic * Jesuits * second scholasticism
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Impact factor: 0.333, year: 2019
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01445340.2019.1615363

There is a well-documented paradigm-shift in eighteenth century Jesuit philosophy and science, at the very least in Central Europe: traditional scholastic version(s) of Aristotelianism were replaced by early modern rationalism (Wolff’s systematisation of Leibnizian philosophy) and early modern science and mathematics. In the field of probability, this meant that the traditional Jesuit engagement with probability, uncertainty, and truthlikeness (in particular, as applied to moral theology) could translate into mathematical language, and can be analysed against the background of the accounts of probability, pre-mathematical Jesuit logic, Wolff’s conceptual analysis, and Bernoullian mathematisation. The works of two Jesuit philosophers, Berthold Hauser and Sigismund Storchenau, can be related to this context. The core of their logic of (epistemic) probability is the account of negation (or ‘contradiction’) and implication (or ‘argument’), in particular, the algorithms for computing the reliability of one piece of evidence when compared to the respective counter-evidence and for computing the probability of a conclusion given the probability of its premises.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0299319