REVIEWS 115 FRANK RAMSEY: A SHEER EXCESS OF POWERS CHERYL MISAK Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, 544 pp., bibliography and index PHILOSOPHER IS ONLY sincere when he lives as his philosophy commends, or, conversely, when his philosophy reflects who he truly is. By this criterion, Frank Ramsey is probably one of the sincerest philosophers ever lived. His pragmatic and humanistic philosophy is, to a great extent, a beautiful reflection of his vigorous and enthusiastic personality; consequently, some knowledge of the latter will corroborate an understanding of the former. This is what Cheryl Misak’s brilliant biography of Ramsey enables us to do: it delivers a delicate balance between the intellectual and the personal aspect of Ramsey’s life, situates his philosophical works in the context of his life, and thus provides us with a profound understanding of what Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy is about. The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with Ramsey’s childhood, and introduces the intellectual background in Cambridge at the time. The second recounts his undergraduate life, his impressive presence as a young prodigy in Cambridge, and his emotional struggles during the period. The third focuses on his astonishing achievements in philosophy, mathematics and economics during the half decade he had before his death. Misak in general deals with these incredibly wide-ranging academic topics at ease and makes them highly accessible to the readers without much professional knowledge in the area. Wherever she feels inadequate, she resorts to relevant experts in the field and asks them to write a page-long exposition of the topic which she then puts in the ‘boxes’ of her book. The boxes, however, are less impressive than the other contents. They are too short to supply much information for both the layman and the professional: the former will find it too compressed and the latter may find it too cursive. Other than that, the book is a brilliant masterpiece. It combines width and depth, the personal and the academic, and is written in a suitably lucid and concise manner. This review provides some background to the book and knits some key points in it so that its gist makes better sense to the readers. Ramsey is, without much doubt, one of the greatest pioneers of pragmatism. It is therefore useful to first explain what pragmatism is. Following Daniel Williams, 1 I see pragmatism as consisting of the following three pillars: 1. Primacy of the practical, 2 or the replacement of ‘copying’ by ‘coping’. 3 According to pragmatists, what we do is prior to what we say, and saying is a kind of doing. By uttering sentences in a language, we do not attempt to represent the world ‘as it is anyway’; 4 rather, language is primarily a special kind of act, in order to communicate, cooperate, and cope with the vicissitudes of the world. This is pragmatism as anti-representationalism (championed by Richard Rorty): language is not a mirror that reflects the world; 5 rather, it is (according to the Later Wittgenstein) a toolbox that we use to serve our various practical ends. 6 2. Human contingency. Pragmatists deeply recognise the contingency of our own perceptive and cognitive faculties, and encourage us not to project our own productions onto the world (common examples: morality, causation, induction, time…). As William James famously puts it, ‘the trail of the human serpent is… over everything’. 7 This is echoed by contemporary A