Name: Frank Ramsey
ISBN: 9780192856753

Frank Ramsey

When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set. For the first time Cheryl Misak tells the full story of his extraordinary life.

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xlaacidDec 2024

Frank Ramsey by Cheryl Misak. Kid only lived till 26 and changed the disciplines of Philosophy, Mathematics, and Economics. Ludwig Wittgenstein was reported to have said Ramsey was his only contemporary.

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xlaacidOct 2024

Walter Issacson's Steve Jobs bio. I legit disliked Steve Jobs. I could not put this book down for the week it took to read. Then I became an Issacson junky. He just digs into the minutia and makes it digestible.

Currently reading Frank Ramsey by Cheryl Misak. Will appeal to philosophy nerds mostly. Fascinating how a kid of 26 changed the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and economics, but no one really knows of him.

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1MachineElfMay 2023

I've been meaning to read up on Frank Ramsey, an early 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and economist, who first postulated that people's actions are determined by the balance between their expectations and their desires. A world built on probability would be up his alley, I imagine.

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totetsuJul 2020

This brings to mind the debates between Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Episode: https://philosophybites.libsyn.com/cheryl-misak-on-frank-ram... Media: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/philosophybites/Cheryl_Mis...

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actualistApr 2020

Philosophical popularity waxes and wanes. At the level Monk describes, the brilliant Frank Ramsey -- with notable philosophical contributions in truth theory and probability, as well as in economic theory and mathematics -- seems similarly missing, though he died at a mere 26. Anyway, as Russell once wrote: "... since one never knows what will be the line of advance, it is always most rash to condemn what is not quite in the fashion of the moment" (from his review of MacColl’s Symbolic Logic and Its Applications in Mind, 15, 1906], p. 260).

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