Buy New

$26.99

FREE Shipping on orders over $35.

In stock but may require an extra 1-2 days to process.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Ship to:

Select a shipping address:

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

A Treatise on Probability Hardcover – June 1, 2007

by John Maynard Keynes (Author)

15 customer reviews

See all 64 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$34.13

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$26.99

$33.10

Paperback

"Please retry"

$4.84

$3.00

Audio CD

"Please retry"

—

Unknown Binding

"Please retry"

—

His fame as an economist aside, John Maynard Keynes may be best remembered for saying, "In the long run, we are all dead." That phrase may well be the most succinct expression of the theory of probability every uttered. For a longer explanation of the premise that underlies much of modern mathematics and science, Keynes's A Treatise on Probability is essential reading.

First published in 1920, this is the foundational work of probability theory, which helped establish the author's enormous influence on modern economic and even political theories.

Exploring aspects of randomness and chance, inductive reasoning and logical statistics, this is a work that belongs in the library of any interested in numbers and their application in the real world.

British economist JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (1883-1946) also wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), The End of Laissez-Faire (1926), The Means to Prosperity (1933), and General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).

A Treatise on Probability

$26.99 FREE Shipping on orders over $35. In stock but may require an extra 1-2 days to process. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

John Maynard Keynes

4

Paperback
$19.99
John Maynard Keynes

3

Hardcover
$28.95
John Maynard Keynes

156

Paperback
$8.68
John Maynard Keynes

2

Paperback
$12.45
John Maynard Keynes

1

Paperback
$24.99
John Maynard Keynes

17

Paperback
$9.95

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Product Details

Hardcover: 484 pages
Publisher: Cosimo Classics (June 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1602066965
ISBN-13: 978-1602066960
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,260,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3012 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Logic & Language
- #58520 in Books > Business & Money > Economics

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Customer Reviews

3.1 out of 5 stars

5 star		47%
4 star		0%
3 star		7%
2 star		13%
1 star		33%

See all 15 customer reviews

Share your thoughts with other customers

Write a customer review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful

This particular edition is unusable

By Sebastian on February 12, 2010

Verified Purchase

This particular edition (A Treatise on Probability by General Books LLC) of the book seems a ripoff to me and I strongly recommend against buying it.
The small print on the front pages states that the book was created with OCR, to "keep the cost as low as possible".
That's all very well, but readability was kept as low as possible too.

To name a few issues, apart from a stream of spelling errors:
- a table of contents with no titles, just "section 1", "section 2" and so on
- random sections: section 17 starts with "chapter XXI", section 30 with "chapter XXXIII", section 31 appears to be the index
- sections starting in midsentence and, conversely, "chapter XXIX" appearing unceremoniously halfway down a page
- an index which refers to seemingly random pagenumbers
- mathematical formulas that are undecipherable ... supposing these typographical trainwrecks were formulas in the first place
- footnotes strewn through the text, again supposing that the many lines starting with digits are indeed footnotes.
- no layout whatsoever

Please read similar comments on:
[...]

The offer to download the original scan of the book from their website [...] seems meaningless too,
I couldn't find the book by author, title, barcode or ISBN.

2 Comments Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

52 of 64 people found the following review helpful

The best book published on the foundations of probability

By Michael Emmett Brady on May 16, 2005

Format: Hardcover

In this path breaking contribution to the logic of probability,Keynes showed how to adapt the work of George Boole for the purpose of estimating probabilities.Keynes is the first scholar in history to explicitly emphasize the importance of interval estimates in decision making.For Keynes there are only two types of probability estimates,point estimates and interval estimates.Unfortunately,Keynes decided to call interval estimates "non-numerical"probabilities.His reasoning is really quite obvious.A precise estimate of probability used a single numeral for the point estimate.Therefore,an imprecise estimate of probability used two numerals to denote an interval(set).Thus, an interval estimate is not based on a single numeral but two. These types of probabilities are thus "non-numerical"because you are not using a single numeral.In 1922 and 1926,Frank Ramsey reviewed Keynes's book based on his reading of chapters 1-4 plus 3 pages from Part two and 4 pages from Part five.Keynes's discussion of non-numerical probabilities takes place in chapters 5,10,15 and 17.Keynes then applies his new approach to induction and analogy in chapters 20 and 22,using his concept of "finite probability"which applies to both precise numerical probabilities and imprecise non-numerical probabilities.All of Keynes's discoveries ,however,were ignored by the ignorant Ramsey.(To this day(2005)one can regularly read about Keynes's "strange,mysterious,unfathomable,undefined"non-numerical probabilities in literally hundreds of economics and philosophy journal articlesthat are based primarily on Ramsey's reviews.These reviews are still cited as "overwhelming" evidence that Keynes agreed that Ramsey's critique had demolished the entire structure of his logical approach to probability.Nothing could be further from the truth.Read more ›

20 Comments Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

Book Not Readable

By Eileen P on March 8, 2011

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

Save your $0.99! This is an unreadable edition of a great book. After opening my wirelessly delivered copy, I found the following:

TIIK Hubjtwl mutter of this book was first broached i the brain of Lfibuix, who, in thn dwHortation, written in his twenty-third yiwr, o the woilt .....

And so it continues, page after page. This from a product "optimized for my Kindle"? It reads like a Robert Benchley parody of Old English.

I obviously will not sue Amazon to recover my $0.99, but I will advise others to not buy this edition of Keynes excellent book.

Comment Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

J.M.Keynes-Founder of the Interval valued approach to probab

By Michael Emmett Brady on June 21, 2004

Format: Paperback

In this path breaking contribution to the logic of probability,Keynes showed how to adapt the work of George Boole for the purpose of estimating probabilities.For Keynes there are only two types of probability estimates,point estimates and interval estimates.Unfortunately,Keynes decided to call interval estimates "non-numerical"probabilities.His reasoning is really quite obvious.A precise estimate of probability used a single numeral for the point estimate.Therefore,an imprecise estimate of probability used two numerals to denote an interval(set).Thus, an interval estimate is not based on a single numeral but two. These types of probabilities are thus "non-numerical"because you are not using a single numeral.In 1922 and 1926,Frank Ramsey reviewed Keynes's book based on his reading of chapters 1-4 plus 3 pages from Part two and 4 pages from Part five.Keynes's discussion of non-numerical probabilities takes place in chapters 5,10,15 and 17.Keynes then applies his new approach to induction and analogy in chapters 20 and 22,using his concept of "finite probability"which applies to both precise numerical probabilities and imprecise non-numerical probabilities.All of Keynes's discoveries ,however,were ignored by the ignorant Ramsey.To this day(2004)one can regularly read about Keynes's "strange,mysterious,unfathomable,undefined"non-numerical probabilities in literally hundreds of economics and philosophy journal articles based on Ramsey's reviews.Keynes then showed that interval estimates,because they overlap,would very likely also,in many cases,be noncomparable and/or nonrankable if a decision maker used such order preserving operators like"greater than or equal to"or "less than or equal to".While this is quite obvious,it went completely over Ramsey's head.Read more ›

6 Comments Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

Report abuse

See all 15 customer reviews (newest first)

Write a customer review

Most Recent Customer Reviews

Kindle edition unreadable

The kindle edition is so full of typos that it is utterly unreadable. Not just an incorrect letter here and there, but entire sentences reduced to gibberish that looks like... Read more

Published 24 months ago by Jonathan Gilligan

Great book, pity about the kindle version

I purchased the kindle version of this book to tide me over whilst waiting for the hard copy to arrive in the mail. Read more

Published on June 18, 2013 by Karen S.

Historical book

Truly an historical, seminal book. It changed the direction and tone for all human history, including of course economics and history.

Published on March 5, 2013 by Kenneth Zimmerman

A Treatise on Probability by General Books LLC is OCR nonsense

This particular edition (A Treatise on Probability by General Books LLC) of the book seems a ripoff to me and I strongly recommend against buying it. Read more

Published on February 19, 2010 by Gunnar Taraldsen

Interesting and scary

So you think you know how and why the markets work the way they do.... Try reading this!

Published on January 22, 2010 by K. Campbell

Not Famous, for a reason

Keynes is famous for economics. This book is a
fairly well written introduction to probability,
but there are many other books which I would
recommend above... Read more

Published on March 31, 2009 by D. Chapman

Very extravagant

In fact the copy I received contains only blank pages, without any text, absolutly none. I don't know if it is odd. May be it is a singular copy. Read more

Published on November 16, 2008 by R. NAIQUE

Historically important ... but.

The author introduces key concepts for the first time. He also introduces some ideas that I had not seen before. The book is historically important. Read more

Published on November 2, 2008 by J. Hall

Oustanding!

This is an outstanding book from an outstanding mind better known from his revolutionary economic ideas.

Published on February 14, 2008 by Jean-claude Couture

Contains the first mathematically designed interval estimate approach...

In this path breaking contribution to the logic of probability,Keynes showed how to adapt the work of George Boole for the purpose of estimating probabilities. Read more

Published on August 11, 2007 by Michael Emmett Brady

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more