Despite the fame of Laplace's Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, it is not in fact a very original work. The classical interpretation of probability emerged from discussion in the period roughly from 1650 to 1800, which saw the introduction which saw the introduction and development of the mathematical theory of probability. Most of the ideas of the classical theory are to be found in Part IV of Jacob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi, published in 1713, and Bernoulli had discussed these ideas in correspondence with Leibniz. Nonethless, it was Laplace's essay which introduced the ideas of the classical interpretation of probability to mathematicians and philosophers in the nineteenth century. This may simply have been because Laplace's essay was written in French and Bernoulli's's Ars Conjectandi in Latin, a language which was becoming increasingly unreadable by scientists and mathematicians in the nineteenth century.

[…] Laplace generalised and improved the results of his predecessors — particularly those of Bernoulli, De Moivre and Bayes. His massive Théorie analytique des Probabilitiés, published in 1812, was the summary of more than a century and a half of mathematical research together with important developments by the author. This book established probability theory as no longer a minority interest but rather a major branch of mathematics.