"Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory. He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory, and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory."

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“From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.”

“Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!”

“Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.”

“Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.”

“Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.”

“When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.”

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Entertainment1971

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— Christopher Hitchens

Philosophy1949–2011

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— Norman Angell

Economics1872–1967

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"I really have no claim to rank myself among fatalistic, materialistic, or atheistic philosophers. Not among fatalists, for I take the conception of necessity to have a logical, and not a physical foun…"

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