founding figure of econometrics. Cournot maintained a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism, seeing the world as subject to principle, but also as manifesting the objective existence of chances deriving from the intersection of different independent chains of unfolding events. His main philosophical work was the Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caracteres de la critique philosophique (1861) trs. as An Essay on the Foundations of our Knowledge (1956).