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Index
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface to the 2015 Edition
Preface
1. The Ancient Law of Proof
Egypt and Mesopotamia
The Talmud
Roman Law: Proof and Presumptions
Indian Law
2. The Medieval Law of Evidence: Suspicion, Half-proof, and Inquisition
Dark Age Ordeals
The Gregorian Revolution
The Glossators Invent Half-proof
Presumptions in Canon Law
Grades of Evidence and Torture
The Postglossators Bartolus and Baldus: The Completed Theory
The Inquisition
Law in the East
3. Renaissance Law
Henry VIII Presumed Wed
Tudor Treason Trials
Continental Law: The Treatises on Presumptions
The Witch Inquisitors
English Legal Theory and the Reasonable Man
4. The Doubting Conscience and Moral Certainty
Penance and Doubts
The Doctrine of Probabilism
Suarez: Negative and Positive Doubt
Grotius, Silhon, and the Morality of the State
Hobbes and the Risk of Attack
The Scandal of Laxism
English Casuists Pursue the Middle Way
Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz, Prince of Laxists
Pascal’s Provincial Letters
5. Rhetoric, Logic, Theory
The Greek Vocabulary of Probability
The Sophists Sell the Art of Persuasion
Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Logic
The Rhetoric to Alexander
Roman Rhetoric: Cicero and Quintilian
Islamic Logic
The Scholastic Dialectical Syllogism
Probability in Ordinary Language
Humanist Rhetoric
Late Scholastic Logics
6. Hard Science
Observation and Theory
Aristotle’s Not-by-Chance Argument
Averaging of Observations in Greek Astronomy
The Simplicity of Theories
Nicole Oresme on Relative Frequency
Copernicus
Kepler Harmonizes Observations
Galileo on the Probability of the Copernican Hypothesis
7. Soft Science and History
The Physiognomics
Divination and Astrology
The Empiric School of Medicine on Drug Testing
The Talmud and Maimonides on Majorities
Vernacular Averaging and Quality Control
Experimentation in Biology
The Authority of Histories
The Authenticity of Documents
Valla and the Donation of Constantine
Cano on the Signs of True Histories
8. Philosophy: Action and Induction
Carneades’s Mitigated Skepticism
The Epicureans on Inference from Signs
Inductive Skepticism and Avicenna’s Reply
Aquinas on Tendencies
Scotus and Ockham on Induction
Nicholas of Autrecourt
The Decline of the West
Bacon and Descartes: Certainty? or Moral Certainty?
The Jesuits and Hobbes on Induction
Pascal’s Deductivist Philosophy of Science
9. Religion: Laws of God, Laws of Nature
The Argument from Design
The Church Fathers
Inductive Skepticism by Revelation
John of Salisbury
Maimonides on Creation
Are Laws of Nature Necessary?
The Reasonableness of Christianity
Pascal’s Wager
10. Aleatory Contracts: Insurance, Annuities, and Bets
The Price of Peril
Doubtful Claims in Jewish Law
Olivi on Usury and Future Profits
Pricing Life Annuities
Speculation in Public Debt
Insurance Rates
Renaissance Bets and Speculation
Lots and Lotteries
Commerce and the Casuists
11. Dice
Games of Chance in Antiquity
The Medieval Manuscript on the Interrupted Game
Cardano
Gamblers and Casuists
Galileo’s Fragment
De Méré and Roberval
The Fermat-Pascal Correspondence
Huygens’ Reckoning in Games of Chance
Caramuel
12. Conclusion
Subsymbolic Probability and the Transition to Symbols
Kinds of Probability and the Stages in Discovering Them
Why Not Earlier?
Two Parallel Histories
The Genius of the Scholastics and the Orbit of Aristotle
The Place of Law in the History of Ideas
Conclusion and Moral
Epilogue: The Survival of Unquantified Probability
The Port-Royal Logic
Leibniz’s Logic of Probability
To the Present
Appendix: Review of Work on Probability before 1660
Notes
Index
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