Isaac Levi

Isaac Levi
Born	June 30, 1930 (1930-06-30)
Died	December 25, 2018(2018-12-25) (aged 88)
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Neopragmatism
Doctoral students	John Danaher
Main interests	Pragmatism, epistemology, decision theory, philosophy of science
Notable ideas	Commitment/performance distinction, corrigibilism/fallibilism distinction, indeterminate probability, Levi identity, unity of reason thesis

Isaac Levi (June 30, 1930 – December 25, 2018) was an American philosopher who served as the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is noted for his work in epistemology and decision theory.

Education and career

Levi was one of several doctoral students of Ernest Nagel at Columbia University who were influential in American post-war philosophy; others were Morton White, Patrick Suppes, and Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. Levi taught at Case Western Reserve University before joining the Columbia faculty in 1970. He was elected in 1986 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Levi also served as doctoral advisor to prominent formal philosophers, including Horacio Arló-Costa and Teddy Seidenfeld, and acted as a mentor to Cheryl Misak during her year at Columbia. There was a debate between Kyburg and Levi on topics in what has come to be known as formal epistemology.

Philosophical work

Levi first made a name for himself with his first book, Gambling with Truth. In the text Levi offered a decision theoretic reconstruction of epistemology with a close-eye towards the classical pragmatist philosophers like William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. Levi was known for his work in belief revision and imprecise probability.

Major publications

Books

• Levi, Isaac (1973) [1967]. Gambling with truth: an essay on induction and the aims of science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262620260. Originally issued by Knopf (1967).
• Levi, Isaac (1980). The enterprise of knowledge: an essay on knowledge, credal probability, and chance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262620437.
• Levi, Isaac (1984). Decisions and revisions: philosophical essays on knowledge and value. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521027625.
• Levi, Isaac (1986). Hard choices: decision making under unresolved conflict. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521386302.
• Levi, Isaac (1991). The fixation of belief and its undoing: changing beliefs through inquiry. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521110297.
• Levi, Isaac (1996). For the sake of the argument: Ramsey Test conditionals, inductive inference and nonmonotonic reasoning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521039017.
• Levi, Isaac (1997). The covenant of reason: rationality and the commitments of thought. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139173032.

Chapters in books

• Levi, Isaac (2009), "Convexity and separability in representing consensus", in Kanbur, Ravi; Basu, Kaushik (eds.), Arguments for a better world: essays in honor of Amartya Sen | Volume I: Ethics, welfare, and measurement, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 193–212, ISBN 9780199239115.

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers