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Simon Blackburn, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, by Cheryl Misak, Mind, Volume 130, Issue 520, October 2021, Pages 1367–1375, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzaa093
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It would be difficult to praise this wonderful book too highly. It is an exemplary biography, not only detailing the life and work of one of the most remarkable minds of the twentieth century, but also doing so with great panache, historical scholarship and philosophical understanding. Clearly the result of meticulous archival work, it does full justice to Ramsey’s extraordinary abilities, and to his rich, if short, life. On the way it also illuminates the Cambridge of Ramsey’s time, with its galaxy of economists, mathematicians and philosophers. But Ramsey’s world extended beyond Cambridge. Certainly, it was occupied by Wittgenstein, Keynes, Russell, Moore, Hardy, and Littlewood, but Misak tells us as well of the Bloomsbury group, the Vienna Circle, psychoanalysts, and countless others. Since he made seminal contributions to mathematics, logic, philosophy, economics and decision theory it would be impossible for any normal human being to do justice to it all, but Misak deals with the problem by having specialist collaborators from different disciplines talk about individual contributions, in specialist boxes inserted within the main text.