Isaac Levi is the John Dewey

John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...

 Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. Levi came onto the philosophic scene with his groundbreaking first book, Gambling with Truth. In the text Levi offers a decision theoretic

Decision theory

Decision theory in economics, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and statistics is concerned with identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues relevant in a given decision, its rationality, and the resulting optimal decision...

 reconstruction of epistemology with a close-eye towards the classical pragmatist

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...

 philosophers like William James

William James

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

 and Charles Sanders Peirce. Levi is known for his pioneering work in belief revision

Belief revision

Belief revision is the process of changing beliefs to take into account a new piece of information. The logical formalization of belief revision is researched in philosophy, in databases, and in artificial intelligence for the design of rational agents....

 and imprecise probability

Imprecise probability

Imprecise probability generalizes probability theory to allow for partial probability specifications, and is applicable when information is scarce, vague, or conflicting, in which case a unique probability distribution may be hard to identify...

.

Levi is one of several doctoral students of Ernest Nagel

Ernest Nagel

Ernest Nagel was a Czech-American philosopher of science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is sometimes seen as one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement....

 who were influential in American post-war philosophy; others were Morton White

Morton White

Morton White is an American philosopher and historian of ideas. He is both a central figure in the philosophical movement of Holistic Pragmatism and a noted historian of American philosophical thought...

, Patrick Suppes

Patrick Suppes

Patrick Colonel Suppes is an American philosopher who has made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology, and educational technology...

, Henry Kyburg

Henry E. Kyburg, Jr.

Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. was Gideon Burbank Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, New York, and Pace Eminent Scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Florida...

, and Sidney Morgenbesser

Sidney Morgenbesser

Sidney Morgenbesser was a Columbia University philosopher. Born in New York City, he undertook philosophical study at the City College of New York and rabbinical study at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, then pursued graduate study in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where...

. Levi also served as doctoral advisor to prominent formal philosophers, including Horacio Arló-Costa and Teddy Seidenfeld. Morgenbesser once quipped that Seidenfeld, who studied under Kyburg as an undergraduate, was Kyburg's revenge upon Levi. There is a rich literature of debate between Kyburg and Levi on topics in formal epistemology

Formal epistemology

Formal epistemology uses formal methods from decision theory, logic, probability theory and computability theory to elucidate epistemic problems. Work in this area spans several academic fields, including philosophy, computer science, economics, and statistics...

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Major publications

• Gambling with Truth, Knopf (1967), reissued in paper in 1973 by MIT Press.
• The Enterprise of Knowledge: An Essay on Knowledge, Credal Probability and Chance, MIT (1980). Paperback (1983).
• Decisions and Revisions, Cambridge University Press (1984).
• Hard Choices: Decision Making under Unresolved Conflict, Cambridge University Press (1986). Paperback (1990).
• The Fixation of Belief and Its Undoing: Changing Beliefs Through Inquiry, Cambridge University Press (1991).
• For the Sake of the Argument: Ramsey Test Conditionals, Inductive Inference and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Cambridge University Press (1996).
• The Covenant of Reason: Rationality and the Commitments of Thought, Cambridge University Press (1997).