John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)

Geoffrey Harcourt

Chapter 18 in Post-Keynesian Essays in Biography, 1993, pp 163-166 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract To understand Keynes’s revolutionary contributions to economics it is important to remember that though he read mathematics at Cambridge as an undergraduate, he spent as much time on philosophy, and subsequently became an original philosopher in his own right. His first major publication, A Treatise on Probability (1921), was on philosophical issues; it was originally written in 1908–9 as a Fellowship dissertation for King’s. Though he was to respond to criticism of it, especially by Frank Ramsey, it nevertheless continued to provide the base for all aspects of his intellectual work. For his thinking about economics he took three lasting lessons from his philosophical understanding; first, the argument that there is a whole spectrum of languages, running continuously from intuition and poetry to mathematics and formal logic, all of which may be relevant at appropriate steps in arguments and for particular issues, or aspects of issues, in economics. Second, there was his realisation that in a discipline such as economics the whole may be more than the sum of the parts, a realisation he came to long before he wrote The General Theory, in which, of course, it played a crucial role. Third, Keynes thought of probability as a form of objective belief and of uncertainty as an absence of probabilistic knowledge — ‘we simply do not know’ (see Lawson, 1993).

Keywords: Collect Work; Philosophical Issue; Major Publication; Intellectual Work; Short Essay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-12826-6_18

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349128266

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-12826-6_18

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().