Synopses & Reviews
F.P. Ramsey was a remarkably creative and subtle philosopher who in the briefest of academic careers (he died in 1930 at 26) made significant contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language and decision theory. His few published papers reveal him to be a figure of comparable importance to Russell, Carnap and Wittgenstein in the history of analytical philosophy. This book is the first critical study of Ramsey's work, offering a thorough exposition and interpretation of his ideas, setting the ideas in their historical context, and assessing their significance for contemporary research. The study is intended to complement the reissue by the Press of Ramsey's papers edited by Professor Hugh Mellor.
Review
"Sahlin is to be congratulated for his bold venture sketching an intellectual portrait of Frank P. Ramsey, a man who mastered existing modes of inuirty in many fields and then extended them." Journal of Economic Literature
Review
"Sahlin has touched on all the bases not only providing us with an accurate exposition of Ramsey's ideas but with illuminating discussion of their significance." Isaac Levi, Columbia University
Review
"Nils-Eric Sahlin's study, The philosophy of F.P. Ramsey, is the only one of its kind. Sahlin has worked out a unified and exhustive interpretation Ramsey's philosophy -- its various parts form indeed a coherent whol -- and it will become the standard for Ramsey's scholarship. This book should...be of the highest interest to any specialist curious enough to wish to learn about adjacent fields...and to see how far a philosopher can go in the direction of a unifying philosophy without sacrificing the rigorous standards of the scientific inquiry." Mathieu Marion, The Journal of Symbolic Logic
Table of Contents
Preface; Introduction; 1. Philosophy of probability; 2. Belief and truth; 3. Knowledge; 4. General propositions and causality; 5. Philosophy of science; 6. Logic and mathematics; 7. Ramsey's theorem; 8. Universals; 9. Economics; 10. Bibliographical glimpses; Bibliography of F. P. Ramsey's works; Index.