Maria Carla Galavotti
Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bologna and a member of the Center for the Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh and of Clare Hall College, Cambridge. She has numerous publications on the foundations of probability, as well as on various epistemological topics like the nature of scientific explanation, prediction, causality, and the role and structure of models in the natural and social sciences. She just published the book Probabilità (La Nuova Italia, 2000).

From his first paper, written in 1926 at the age of twenty, to his death in 1985, Bruno de Finetti published more than 290 works, including books, articles and reviews. During such a long and productive career he gave substantial contributions to the foundations of probability both from a technical and a philosophical point of view, putting forward a very original view. Bayesian subjectivist is the expression used by Bruno de Finetti to qualify his own perspective, to stress that in his conception Bayes' scheme is assigned a central role and that it goes together with a subjective notion of probability. This position is inspired by what we would today call a radically anti-realist philosophy. It finds in the Bayesian approach a way for combining empiricism and pragmatism. The resulting conception is not only incompatible with any perspective based on an objective notion, but cannot be assimilated to other subjective views of probability either. His starting point is the refusal of the notion of truth, and the related notions of determinism and of immutable and necessary laws. In their place, de Finetti reaffirms a conception of science as a human activity, a product of thought, having as its main tool probability. The paper will highlight the main features of de Finetti's philosophy of probability, which can be seen as a radical form of probabilism, centred on the subjective notion of probability as degree of belief.