Richard Jeffrey

Richard Carl Jeffrey (August 5, 1926 – November 9, 2002) was an American philosopher, logician, and probability theorist. He is best known for developing and championing the philosophy of radical probabilism and the associated heuristic of probability kinematics, also known as Jeffrey conditioning. Life and career Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Jeffrey served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. As a graduate student he studied under Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel. He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1952 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1957. After holding academic positions at MIT, City College of New York, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of Princeton in 1974 and became a professor emeritus there in 1999. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine. Jeffrey, who died of lung cancer at the age of 76, was known for his sense of humor, which often came through in his breezy writing style. In the preface of his posthumously published Subjective Probability, he refers to himself as "a fond foolish old fart dying of a surfeit of Pall Malls". Philosophical work As a philosopher, Jeffrey specialized in epistemology and decision theory. He is perhaps best known for defending and developing the Bayesian approach to probability.