THE SCIENCE OF CONJECTURE: PROBABILITY BEFORE PASCAL: Contents

Johns Hopkins University Press, June 2001

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Introduction
Ch. 1 The Ancient Law of Proof: Egypt and Babylon; The Talmud; Roman Law: Proof and Presumptions; Indian Law
Ch. 2 The Medieval Law of Evidence: Suspicion, Half-Proof and Inquisition: The Dark Ages; The Gregorian Revolution; The Glossators Invent "Half-Proof"; Presumptions in Canon Law; Innocent III; Grades of Evidence, and Torture; The Post-Glossators Bartolus and Baldus: The Completed Theory; The Inquisition; Maimonides on Testimony; Law in the East
Ch. 3 Renaissance Law: Henry VIII Presumed Wed; The Tudor Treason Trials; Continental Law: The Treatises on Presumptions; The Witch Inquisitors; English Legal Theory and the Reasonable Man
Ch. 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
Ch. 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; The Last Ancient Authors; Islamic Logic; The Scholastic Dialectical Syllogism; Probability in Ordinary Language; Humanist Rhetoric; Late Scholastic Logics
Ch. 6 Hard Science: Observation and Theory; Aristotle's "Not by Chance" Argument; Averaging of Observations in Greek Astronomy; Nicole Oresme on Relative Frequency; Copernicus; Kepler Harmonises Observations; Galileo on the Probability of the Copernican Hypothesis
Ch. 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
Ch. 8 Philosophy: Action and Induction: Carneades's Mitigated Scepticism; Cicero; The Epicureans on Inference from Signs; Inductive Scepticism, 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
Ch. 9 Religion: Inferring God's Existence and Will: The Argument from Design; The End of Antiquity; John of Salisbury; Maimonides on Creation; Are Laws of Nature Necessary?; The Reasonableness of Christianity; Pascal's Wager
Ch. 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, Lotteries and Speculation; Commerce and the Casuists
Ch. 11 Dice: Antiquity; The Medieval Manuscript on the Interrupted Game; Cardano; Gamblers and Casuists; Gataker on Randomization in Lots; Galileo's Fragment; De Mere and Roberval; The Fermat-Pascal Correspondence; Huygens; Caramuel
Afterword and Conclusions: Sub-symbolic Probability and The Transition to Symbols; The 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
Epilogue: The Survival of Unquantified Probability: The Port-Royal Logic; Leibniz's Logic of Probability; To the Present
Review of work on probability before 1660

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