Colin Howson

Professor Colin Howson (born 1945) is a British philosopher who is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he joined the faculty on July 1, 2008.^[1] Previously, he was Professor of Logic at the London School of Economics. He completed a PhD on the philosophy of probability in 1981. In the late 1960s he had been a research assistant of Imre Lakatos at LSE.

His research interests include philosophy of science, logic, and foundations of probability. He was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science from 2003-2005.^[2] His book, Scientific Reasoning: the Bayesian Approach (with Peter Urbach) is considered the canonical philosophical defense of Bayesian reasoning.^{[citation needed]}

Professor Howson is married to Margaret Morrison, a Canadian philosopher of science who is also a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Publications

Books

• Hume's Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief, (Oxford University Press, 2000); ISBN 978-0-19-825038-8 Peter Lipton in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science describes the book as "Delivered with pace and consistent intelligence" and suggests that it "covers a great deal of ground, including Hume's sceptical argument, the new riddle of induction, naturalised epistemology, reliabilism, scientific realism, deductivism, objective chances and Hume on miracles, all from a Bayesian perspective...often provocative and repeatedly enlightening."^[3]
• Scientific Reasoning: the Bayesian Approach (with Peter Urbach), Open Court Publishing Company, 1989; 2nd ed 1993; 3rd ed 2005 ISBN 978-0812695786 - reviewed e.g. here

Articles

His articles include:

• ‘Evidence and Confirmation’, and ‘Induction and the Uniformity of Nature’, A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, ed. W H Newton-Smith, Blackwell (2000)
• ‘The Logic of Personal Probability’, The Foundations of Bayesianism, eds. D. Corfield and J. Williamson, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 137-161 (2001)
• ‘Bayesianism in Statistics’, in Bayes’s Theorem, ed. Richard Swinburne, The British Academy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 39-71 (2002)
• ‘Bayesian Evidence’, in Observation and Experiment in the Natural and Social Sciences, ed. M Galavotti, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 301-321 (2003)
• ‘Probability and Logic’, Journal of Applied Logic, 1, 151-165 (2003)
• ‘Why Are We Here?’, Short Letters to The Times, Times Books, London: Harpercollins, 167 (2003)
• ‘Ramsey’s Big Idea’, Festschrift for Frank Ramsey, ed. M.J. Frapolli, Rodopi

Notes and references

1. ^ Department of Philosophy - University of Toronto
2. ^ Basic bio-info from LSE website
3. ^ review quoted in OUP website

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Name	Howson, Colin
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Date of birth	1945
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