The Concept of Probability

Hans Reichenbach, a prominent member of the logical empiricist movement, and student and friend of Albert Einstein, was the foremost figure in philosophy of physics in the first half of the 20th century and one of the most influential advocates of the idea that the estimation of probabilities as limits of relative frequencies lies at the foundation of science. Recent scholarship has emphasized the Kantian sources of the logical positivist and scientific philosophy movement early in the last century.

Reichenbach's lucid and original doctoral thesis, never before translated, throws new light on how the Critique of Pure Reason was understood in some quarters at the time. The thesis is the source of several of the themes in Reichenbach's still-influential posthumous book, The Direction of Time, and shows the early focus of Reichenbach's thought on the interdependence of physics, probability, and epistemology, even before the appearance of the quantum theory.

Of much more historical interest, Reichenbach's thesis anticipates in detail the substance of recent work in philosophy of science concerned with how stable macroscopic frequencies can be produced from microscopic causal relations, and attempts a derivation of a special case of the Markov condition relating causality and probability, a subject of widespread contemporary philosophical discussion.

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