Tetiana Bilous: J. M. Keynes and Analytic Philosophy

Organized by the Department of Analytic Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, CAS

Further information

Invitation pdf

Tetiana Bilous (Institute of Philosophy, CAS):
J. M. Keynes and Analytic Philosophy

J. M. Keynes is most famous as an economist, but he was involved with philosophy from the very beginning of his research career. In this lecture, I argue that Keynes's economic thinking was motivated by serious refection on philosophical questions and it is impossible to understand his economic ideas completely apart from discussion of Keynes’s early beliefs. His early beliefs were formed under Moore’s ethic and his relationships with B. Russell, F. Ramsey and L. Wittgenstein. The problem of choice under uncertainty, of which Keynes was preoccupied during his time at Cambridge, led him to investigate the nature of probability and guided his vision of economic reality in The General Theory. Keynes published his views on probability in book Treatise on Probability (1921). On the other hand Keynes’s work on the philosophy of probability is best understood as part of flowering of Analytic philosophy which occurred in Cambridge in the early twentieth century.