There is a well-documented paradigm-shift in eighteenth century Jesuit philosophy and science, at the very least in Central Europe: traditional scholastic version(s) of Aristotelianism were replaced by early modern rationalism (Wolff's systematisation of Leibnizian philosophy) and early modern science and mathematics. In the field of probability, this meant that the traditional Jesuit engagement with probability, uncertainty, and truthlikeness (in particular, as applied to moral theology) could translate into mathematical language, and can be analysed against the background of the accounts of (...) probability, pre-mathematical Jesuit logic, Wolff's conceptual analysis, and Bernoullian mathematisation. The works of two Jesuit philosophers, Berthold Hauser and Sigismund Storchenau, can be related to this context. The core of their logic of (epistemic) probability is the account of negation (or ‘contradiction’) and implication (or ‘argument’), in particular, the algorithms for computing the reliability of one piece of evidence when compared to the respective counter-evidence and for computing the probability of a conclusion given the probability of its premises. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the origins of Polish Romanticism as born partially out of German idealist philosophy. I examine the influence exerted by the ideas of the most significant thinkers, such as Kant, Fichte and Schelling on both professors and students living in Vilnius at the beginning of the nineteenth century (particularly Jan Śniadecki, Józef Gołuchowski and Adam Mickiewicz). As an adherent of Enlightenment and empirical epistemology Śniadecki was critical towards Kant as well as Romantic poetics. On the contrary, in (...) the works of young Gołuchowski, who was well acquainted with German ideas, there are frequent references to Kant, Fichte, and Schelling’s philosophy of life. The same ideas—such as vital nature, feeling, and faith as opposed to “dead” knowledge based on “pure terms”—can be found in Mickiewicz’s early works. This convergence of motifs is due to the fact that they both have the same source of inspiration: German idealism. (shrink)