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Copyright ? 2020Avello Publishing Journal ISSN: 2049 -498XIssue 1 Volume 3: Grammar, Language and LinguisticsBook Review: Cheryl Misak. 2020. Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers Oxford University Press. Jason WakefieldUniversity of CambridgeThis is the first full biography of the economist, philosopher and mathematician Frank Plumpton Ramsey. The book is divided into three parts, his boyhood, his time as a Cambridge man and an astonishing half decade working up until his death at the tender age of 26. This is all very well illustrated with photographs and quotations from his private diaries. Dons at Cambridge and various authorities on Frank Ramsey helped Cheryl Misak draft the scholarly text, such as Simon Blackburn, Huw Price, Timothy Williamson, Hugh Mellor, Ray Monk, Peter Momtchiloff and several others. Frank Ramsey was born in the family house at 71 Chesterton Road in Cambridge where his father Arthur, also a mathematics don, was a graduate and President of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In addition to this his father was chair of the Faculty of Mathematics and dined in College two or three times a week, as was expected of a fellow. His brother Michael would go on to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. In Ramsey's short lifespan he made large marks on several different disciplines, such as philosophy of science, economics, pure mathematics, mathematical logic, probability theory and decision theory. Thus the young don was a true product of Cambridge at its best. His paper 'Truth and Probability' solved the problem of how to measure degrees of belief and provided a model of subjective expected utility. His results underpin contemporary economics and Bayesian statistics, however the paper was not published in Ramsey's short lifetime. 'In economics proper, Ramsey published two papers in Keynes's Economic Journal, one on optimum taxation and one on optimal savings' (Misak 2020: XXV). Each of these classic papers launched new branches in economics. Ramsey also made significant innovations and has several branches of theoretical terms named after him in both pure mathematics and philosophy of language. Thus Ramsey played a serious role in the history of thought in Cambridge where he spent his entire life. In 1921, at the age of only eighteen, Ramsey began officially translating from German into English Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and wrote a Critical Notice of it, published in the October 1923 volume of Mind. Ramsey had many local dignitaries as academic friends, including Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Braithwaite. In 1920, Ramsey might have studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, however his pragmatic influence was also felt in several other disciplines which required logical purity. This fact is included in Hugh Mellor's 1978 radio portrait if the reader would like to hear contributions from Sir Alfred Ayer; Miss Lettice Ramsey; Gabriel Woolf and others about the thinker. Ramsey attended his father's university lectures on dynamics and gained work as a garden boy at Girton College, Cambridge. In this environment, Ramsey became a member of the Heretics Society which was run by the linguistic psychologist and polymath C.K Ogden. The author Virginia Woolf was one of the writers who read a paper at the Cambridge Heretics Society. 'The Hogarth Press, run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, was Freud's English publisher' (Misak 2020: 100). During the 1920s, Moore, Jung, Adler, Piaget and others contributed monographs to the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method under the general editorship of Ogden. In 1920, the seventeen-year-old Ramsey began his undergraduate mathematics degree at Trinity College, Cambridge then befriended the Girton College, Cambridge philosophers Dorothy Wrinch and Susan Stebbing. The Trinity don assigned to him to direct his degree was the classicist Ernest Harrison. 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. Ramsey was not only in the lineage of Keynes's chain of Cambridge thought but also of Bertrand Russell's way of thinking. Indeed Ramsey translated Russell's student Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus whilst only an undergraduate! This book was then snapped up by Ogden for publication in the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. Cheryl Misak includes in her book a few guest comments placed in boxes, which she says can be skipped without interference to the flow of her text's argumentation, however several of these are very insightful, for example the boxes with the titles 'Ramsey on the Douglas Proposals' written by Pedro Garcia Duarte, Professor of Economics at the University of S?o Paulo, 'The Theory of Types' written by Michael Potter, Professor of Logic, Cambridge University, 'Success Semantics' written by Simon Blackburn, Bertrand Russell Professor Emeritus, Cambridge University and 'Frank Ramsey and Quantified Modal Logic' written by Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic, Oxford University. Thus the style of the book is undemanding to read considering the complexity of the academic material of one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century under examination. Chapter 9 has the title 'The New Don' and analyses Ramsey's move from Trinity College, Cambridge to rooms in the Wilkins Building in King's College, Cambridge in which he would both live and teach. His undergraduate student supervisees profited from his supervisions, even when they sometimes wandered off into talk of music and philosophy. For the first time Ramsey was delivering lectures for the Mathematical Tripos: Theory of Equations, Solid Geometry and Functions of a Complex Variable. Frege's The Basic Laws of Arithmetic and Russell's Principia Mathematica where both included in his lectures reading list. During this time Ramsey befriended his future wife Lettice Cautley Baker who studied natural sciences (before switching to philosophy) at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked in London for three years after her graduation, living with Janet Vaughan, who would go on to be Principal of Somerville College, Oxford. Ramsey's parents where pleased that their eldest son was now a don in Cambridge and was in a relationship with an educated woman. After her marriage to Ramsey, Baker became involved with Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf. The final part of Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers gives a detailed account of Ramsey, as a new don, settling down in economical, philosophical and mathematical work. One of the founders of analytic philosophy, G.E Moore, as the editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Mind, got a submission of one Ramsey's papers that he read at the Moral Sciences Club's final meeting of term, in May 1925. Today, Mind is edited by Adrian Moore who graduated with a B.A in philosophy from King's College, Cambridge and a D.Phil in philosophy from Balliol College, Oxford under the supervision of Sir Michael Dummett; as well as, Lucy O' Brien, who is the first female editor of Mind in its history since 1876. In closure of this review, the book is a fascinating historical work of 500 pages. The book will be a delight to read for the intelligentsia of science dons and economics undergraduates alike. The formal language and tone of the book is one of clarity, thus the target audience is a very wide one. One closely read this book with great joy. The endnotes are awesome for scholars who want to track down direct quotes. ................
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