Frank Ramsey

Michael Otte, MathSciNet This book is dedicated to the memory of Ramsey in a solemn and comprehensively devoted manner. The author has tried to satisfy all the parties interested in Ramsey for one reason or another...The result is an introduction to his work, as well as an account of his life.

Jason Wakefield, Avello Publishing Journal Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is a very well researched biography, thus is of great value to academic students and professional scholars alike. The book is a joy to read for not only economists but also mathematicians and philosophers too.

New Statesman, Books of the Year an engaging account of the lamentably short life of Ramsey... exemplary piece(s) of intellectual history...

Richard Davenport-Hines, The Wall Street Journal Frank Ramsey [...] makes noble reading. Ms Misak is a born teacher who explains tricky intellectual abstractions with a clarity that is exceptional. More than that, she writes with love. Her tenderness toward Ramsey, his parents and siblings, his wife and friends gives spirit and delicacy to the whole. There is astounding emotional intelligence in every chapter. One feels on each page Ms. Misak's fine mind concentrating hard on doing the best she can. This is an enthralling and glorious book.

Anthony Gottleib, The New Yorker Philosophers sometimes play the game of imagining how twentieth-century thought might have been different if Ramsey had survived and his ideas had caught on earlier. That exercise has become more entertaining with the publication of the first full biography ... Misak tells a more colorful story than one might have thought possible so long after such a short life ended.

Paolo Mancosu, Philosophia Mathematica Misak' narrative is compelling.

London Review of Books Her book is unlikely to be bettered... Misak provides by far the most complete picture we have of Ramsey's personality and personal life.

Caterina Sisti, Metascience As a whole, the book is a precious piece for the history of analytic philosophy, nicely written and supported by terrific archival research and a love for the author. It is worth reading it for the pleasure of good writing, for a picture of Cambridge at that time, and to learn more about one of the greatest intellects of the last century.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Open ...a brilliant, evocative biography of Ramsey.

Carlo Cristiano, History of Economic Ideas It is thanks to Misak that we can now see Ramsey's mathematical economics from a new and thought-provoking perspective, and this is only one among many reasons why this book deserves to be read.

David C.Coker, George Mason University , Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics There is a lot of talk about Bloomsbury, and therefore about sexual freedom and the many instances that made up that freedom. There is unhappiness (Ramsey struggled coming into his own, as a sexual person). There is much talk of psychoanalysis, and of...

Cheryl Misak is Professor of Philosophy, as well as Vice-President and Provost at the University of Toronto. She received a BA from the University of Lethbridge, an MA from Columbia University, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. She works on American pragmatism, the theory of truth, moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of medicine. She has published and edited books with Oxford University Press, Routledge, and Cambridge University Press, and has published over forty scholarly articles. In 2008, her 'Experience, Narrative, and Ethical Deliberation' was declared one of the ten best papers in philosophy by The Philosopher's Annual. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has been a Humboldt Fellow at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, a Visiting Fellow of St. John's College Cambridge, and a Rhodes Scholar.

Foreword: 'Mind and Heart' Part I: Boyhood 1: The Ramseys 2: Winchester Nearly Unmade Him 3: 'We really live in a great time for thinking' Part II: The Cambridge Man 4: Undergraduate Life 5: 'To my generation, he was rather frightening' 6: Ramsey and the Early Wittgenstein 7: Vienna Interlude 8: 'The fundamentals are so philosophical' 9: The New Don 10: Passion Found Part III: An Astonishing Half Decade 11: Settling Down in Work and Life 12: Revolution in Philosophy 13: Two Crises 14: Cambridge Economics 15: Ramseyan Economics: The Feasible First Best 16: 1928 Return to Mathematics 17: Wittgenstein Comes Home 18: 'The problem of philosophy must be divided if I am to solve it' 19: The End and Meaning of a Life