Two Essays on Entropy

Two Essays on Entropy by Rudolf Carnap (edited with an introduction by Abner Shimony) brings a major twentieth-century philosopher of science to the front lines of thermodynamics, probability, and inductive logic. Written during Carnap’s 1952–54 fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, these essays pursue an “abstract concept of entropy” usable for scientific inference while testing, with unusual clarity, the coherence of the physicists’ own statistical notion. Carnap’s guiding claim...