Keynes’s Philosophical Thinking

Abstract

The interpretation of John Maynard Keynes’s philosophical thinking involves significant methodological difficulties which ought to be identified and understood prior to any attempt to explain that philosophy. These difficulties chiefly stem from the fact that Keynes’s philosophical and economic work were carried out during almost entirely different periods of Keynes’s life and intellectual career. When he was first an undergraduate at Cambridge, Keynes thought that his important scholarly efforts were likely to be made in contributions to the philosophy of logic only recently initiated in Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s.¹ Principia Mathematica.Yet when Keynes completed his undergraduate study, his interests had shifted more economics, politics, and economic policy, and philosophy had come to be more of an avocation than a vocation for him. Indeed by the time hisTreatise on Probabilitywas essentially finished (around the beginning of the first World War), he had all but put aside the sort of systematic discussion of philosophical ideas he had pursued in his undergraduate and immediate postgraduate years at Cambridge with the result that philosophical ideas are either altogether absent from the language and thought of Keynes’s economics, or such philosophical themes as do appear in Keynes’s economics appear at such significant remove from the contexts in which they originally functioned that we must wonder whether their meanings and roles have been subtly changed by their re-location to economics.

Article Footnote

Sections one and two of this paper draw upon Davis 1994a and 1994b.

Article Footnote

For a discussion of early Cambridge analytic philosophy and how Russell and Whitehead’s work fit into it, see Urmson (1956). For Keynes’s early history, see Skidelsky (1983) and Moggridge (1992).