"Improbable Probability": On Evidence in the Eighteenth Century.

From: The Germanic Review | Date: March 22, 2001| Author: CAMPE, RUDIGER | Copyright information

I. A Discourse on Evidence, 1724

In 1724, at the end of his rectorship at the University of Leiden--then famous for the natural sciences and what was beginning to be called "Newtonian philosophy"(1) --the mathematician and philosopher Willem s'Gravesande delivers his farewell address.(2) In this speech, the rector not only takes up the word "evidence" in its philosophical sense from Descartes and Pascal, Leibniz and Locke, but in so doing, also further elaborates a conc...

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