Abstract

In her preface to this collection of 11 new essays on Ramsey, Frápolli clarifies the nonhistorical orientation of the volume: ‘Our way of honoring Ramsey has been to think with him and, wherever possible, to go beyond that, putting his ideas to work and seeing how far they can reach’ (ix). This certainly makes sense for the topics of many of these essays, building as they do on Ramsey’s rich contributions to economics and reliabilist epistemology as well as on his suggestive proposals about truth, pragmatism and the content of scientific theories. Unfortunately, such an orientation leads to mixed results for the four essays that squarely focus on Ramsey’s philosophy of logic and mathematics. Here Ramsey’s contemporary significance is more debatable and the most fertile mathematical innovation that Ramsey offered, namely ‘Ramsey theory’, is not noted by the contributors to this volume