Ramsey

Catalog description

Frank Ramsey's untimely death in 1930, at the age of 26, marked the loss of a versatile and original thinker. During his short life, he made decisive and influential contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics. The entire core of Ramsey's philosophical and scientific work consists of no more than 15 papers; in all cases they are remarkable essays that changed the intellectual topics they touched. This course will explore Ramsey's seminal contributions to probability and decision theory, philosophical and mathematical logic, the foundations of mathematics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. We will read some of Ramsey's original papers as well as more recent work inspired in response to, or as an elaboration on, Ramsey's views. We will see how Ramsey laid the foundations of the theory of subjective probability and decision theory, offered one of the first formulations of a deflationary theory of truth, and inspired contemporary work in philosophical logic (particularly on the logic of conditionals). We will explore Ramsey's influential work in the philosophy of science - his accounts of laws, causality, and the nature of scientific theories - as well as his mathematical contributions to logic and (what is now known as) Ramsey theory. By examining Ramsey's contributions and their impact, the course will give a sense of their important position as quintessential examples of work in the analytic tradition, demonstrating the intellectual fruitfulness of interdisciplinary inquiry into foundational questions and of mathematically informed philosophy.