Probabilities in Physics

Probability plays a key role in modern physics: an international team of philosophers illuminate this role by exploring the epistemology and metaphysics of probabilities. They discuss statistical physics, probabilistic modelling, and quantum mechanics and critically assess objectivist and subjectivist views of probabilities in these fields.

Claus Beisbart is Assistant Professor at the Technical University Dortmund (Germany). He holds a doctorate in physics (2001) and a doctorate in philosophy (2004; both from the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich). During the academic year 2008/09, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His main work is in the philosophy of physics, in particular the philosophy of cosmology, in the general philosophy of science, and in ethics and social-choice theory.

Stephan Hartmann is Chair of Philosophy of Science in the Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and the Study of Religion at LMU Munich, Alexander von Humboldt Professor, and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). From 2007 to 2012 he worked at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, where he was Chair in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science and Director of the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS). Before moving to Tilburg, he was Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Director of LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. His primary research and teaching areas are philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, formal epistemology, and social epistemology. Hartmann published numerous articles and the book Bayesian Epistemology (with Luc Bovens) that appeared in 2003 with Oxford University Press. His current research interests include formal social epistemology (especially models of deliberation, norm emergence, and pluralistic ignorance), the philosophy and psychology of reasoning, intertheoretic relations, and (imprecise) probabilities in quantum mechanics.