Richard Price

Richard Price (1723 to 1791) was a British moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician, born in Llangeinor in Glamorgan, Wales, the son of a dissenting minister. He spent most of his adult life in London as minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and helped develop the Bayes-Price theorem and the field of actuarial science. His Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758) sets out his theory of ethics, and he also wrote on theology, demography and finance. A political reformer active in radical, republican and liberal causes such as the French and American Revolutions, he kept up a wide correspondence with figures including Thomas Jefferson, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet.