Frank Ramsey—a philosopher, economist, and mathematician—was one of the greatest minds of the last century. Have we caught up with him yet?
“The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued.
Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. He did little to advertise the importance of his ideas, and his modesty did not help. He was not particularly impressed with himself—he thought he was rather lazy. At the same time, the speed with which his mind worked sometimes left a blur on the page. The prominent American philosopher Donald Davidson was one of several thinkers to experience what he dubbed “the Ramsey effect.
The two brothers later diverged in religious matters as well. Frank was an atheist by the age of thirteen; Michael entered the Anglican Church and became the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his final year of secondary school, Ramsey decided to focus on pure mathematics, which is what he would earn his degree in, teach, and use as a tool. But philosophy was always what gripped him most. At school, he had read Bertrand Russell’s “The Principles of Mathematics,” which argued for the “logicist” view that mathematical truths and concepts can be derived from logical ones.
In Vienna, he was treated by Theodor Reik, one of Freud’s first pupils. Initially, Ramsey found the sessions unpleasant and he was sometimes bored by so much talk about himself. He lent Reik a copy of the “Tractatus,” and was annoyed when Reik declared that its author must have some sort of compulsion neurosis. But after six months he told his parents that he found Reik “jolly clever,” and that being analyzed was likely to improve his work.
There was a broader philosophical picture behind his humor. He was attracted by the idea that beliefs of all sorts were best understood in terms of their consequences. He called this “pragmatism,” following the American philosopher C. S. Peirce, who died in 1914. Ramsey took the essence of pragmatism to be that “the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects.
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