According to the Oxford English Dictonary George Berkeley introduced the term a priori into English. His inspiration for this was, it seems, to be found partly in the writings of his immediate predecessors, particularly Pierre Bayle, and partly in his pedagogical work where he adjudicated disputations between his pupils. Some of his arguments against the existence of matter Berkeley tells us are a priori, others a posteriori. Even the a priori arguments are underpinned by prior semantic principles of an anti-abstractionist character, which are shown to be important particularly in the immaterialist philosophy of mathematics. Berkeley's courageously unorthodox, and generally unpublished, thoughts about mathematics thus grow from the same soil as his celebrated denial of matter., Marek Tomeček., and Obsahuje poznámky a bibliografii
The study of foraging behaviour of 20 forest bird species was conducted during two different phenophases of a vegetation period in the West Carpathians oak-dominated natural forests. Using a standard and a modified a priori approaches, seven foraging guilds were distinguished, whereas only five significantly different guilds were clustered by a a posteriori approach. Four common guilds for all three approaches were quantitatively compared. The methods differed especially in the classification of foraging generalists. Differences in guild densities between a priori and a posteriori approaches emerged in both, the pre-foliage and the foliage periods, chiefly in the guilds of insectivores on ground surface (47.3–89.6%) and insectivores on buds/leaves and twigs (15.0–45.9%). The modified a priori method provided moderate densities of separate guilds. The modified a priori method with more detailed density calculation is recommended for the quantitative guild structure comparisons of different bird assemblages. The method takes into consideration proportional use of foraging substrates in combination with food type.