What do you think?
Rate this book
Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers
The full story of Frank Ramsey's extraordinary life.
When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set. For the first time, Cheryl Misak tells the story of his tragically short, but extraordinary life.
When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set. For the first time, Cheryl Misak tells the story of his tragically short, but extraordinary life.
544 pages, Hardcover
Published March 6, 2020
175 people are currently reading
1234 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
March 5, 2020
This is an outstanding book, about an extraordinary man.
During his tragically short life (he died in 1930 shortly before his 27th birthday) Frank Ramsey made significant contributions to philosophy, economics and pure mathematics, many of which were not recognised until many years later. He was influenced by, but also influenced Wittgenstein, Keynes and Bertrand Russell.
If describing someone as a genius means anything, clearly he was one of the greatest geniuses of the last 100 years. And yet he is virtually unknown outside academic circles. Why? Perhaps because it has been difficult for someone who isn’t an “expert” to get to grips with the range and depth of his achievements – where they came from, what they mean and the effect that they have had.
Until now, that is. In “Frank Ramsey - a sheer excess of powers” Professor Cheryl Misak not only gives a warm and insightful account of Frank Ramsey the man, but rises magnificently to the challenge of putting his ideas across to a general reader with sufficient detail to be useful and clarity to be understandable (and, if you want to know more, the book contains short sections, that can be read separately in which specialist scholars explore particular ideas in more depth).
This book is a remarkable achievement which I can’t recommend highly enough. As someone else has already said “Finally Ramsey has the biography he deserves.”
If you already know anything about Frank Ramsey you’ll want to read this book.
And if you know nothing at all about him you should read this book.
PS: OUP – when this comes out in paperback put the photographs in a separate section on shiny paper where they can be seen properly, not scattered through the book, muddily printed on text paper.
During his tragically short life (he died in 1930 shortly before his 27th birthday) Frank Ramsey made significant contributions to philosophy, economics and pure mathematics, many of which were not recognised until many years later. He was influenced by, but also influenced Wittgenstein, Keynes and Bertrand Russell.
If describing someone as a genius means anything, clearly he was one of the greatest geniuses of the last 100 years. And yet he is virtually unknown outside academic circles. Why? Perhaps because it has been difficult for someone who isn’t an “expert” to get to grips with the range and depth of his achievements – where they came from, what they mean and the effect that they have had.
Until now, that is. In “Frank Ramsey - a sheer excess of powers” Professor Cheryl Misak not only gives a warm and insightful account of Frank Ramsey the man, but rises magnificently to the challenge of putting his ideas across to a general reader with sufficient detail to be useful and clarity to be understandable (and, if you want to know more, the book contains short sections, that can be read separately in which specialist scholars explore particular ideas in more depth).
This book is a remarkable achievement which I can’t recommend highly enough. As someone else has already said “Finally Ramsey has the biography he deserves.”
If you already know anything about Frank Ramsey you’ll want to read this book.
And if you know nothing at all about him you should read this book.
PS: OUP – when this comes out in paperback put the photographs in a separate section on shiny paper where they can be seen properly, not scattered through the book, muddily printed on text paper.
August 21, 2020
I should preface this review by disclosing, I know the author and actually commented on a manuscript of this book before its publication, all opinions remain my own.
This book is a comprehensive philosophical biography of Frank Ramsey. It also includes much biographical information about the man, his family and friends over the course of his short life. The focus is very much on Ramsey's work and relating his personal biography to that. However a portrait of the man and not just the philosopher is given, including his love affairs, details of his preferences for food and musical entertainment. This detail and broad ambit explains how a biography of a man who lived only 27 years manages to occupy over 800 pages.
The structure of the book is mostly diachronic beginning with a brief sketch of his parents families and how they came to meet and so Frank Ramsey came to be born. The book then follows his early development and education talking both about the general character and giving a few detailed instances as corroborative detail. His political experiences as the son of a politically active mother are discussed and his talents in all school subjects especially mathematics. However the book glides relatively quickly (in about a hundred pages or so) over the first seventeen years of his life whereupon he began his undergraduate career at Cambridge. It is here he began interacting with the thinkers (philosophers, economists and mathematicians) who would constitute his core intellectual circle and influences and began contributing to the various problems that would become his life work.
While still an undergraduate Ramsey would dispute with Keynes about the nature of probability and translate Wittgenstein's arcane and epoch making Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus from German into English. After finishing his undergraduate degree and spending six months in Vienna writing and discussing with luminaries such as Wittgenstein and members of the Vienna Circle (and being psychoanalyzed by a student of Freud), Ramsey became a fellow at King's college Cambridge teaching mathematics, but whose research was mostly in philosophy. He wrote on the foundations of mathematics giving his own take on the logicist project of Russell and Frege, he would give an important lecture on the nature of probability and truth. In economics he published two papers one of optimal taxation and the other on optimal savings. He also wrote a paper on pure mathematics on a special case of the Entscheidungs problem (showing if and how mathematical statements could be decided true of false by some mechanical process of calculation). At the time of his death Ramsey writing a book on Truth and Probability expanding on ideas and themes in an earlier paper. Some of his unpublished work would be published soon after his death including a version of his paper on Truth and Probability, other subjects included theories, causality, knowledge and related issues. These would have limited immediate impact but would often go on to be discovered later and found in various ways insightful on continuing problems in philosophy. His mathematical and economic work was likewise destined for a long after life illustrative of his penetrating and far reaching intellect. The personal details of his life, the attitude of his writing and the testimonials of his friends sketch a witty, humane and generally optimistic individual who seemed a delight to know.
Misak has enlisted the aide of various experts (philosophers, economists, mathematicians) to compose short guest (2-3 page) boxes that explain some technical detail of Ramsey's work and sketch some of its broader implications. Misak herself often deals more or less directly with technical aspects of Ramsey's work in various ways. However the main theme of her explication is the growth of pragmatist ideas and commitment in Ramsey's work. Abstract philosophical matters such as truth and belief are cast in terms of their practical effects, usefulness to humans and so on, rather than austere logical or mathematical constructions. This focus is natural for Misak whose work has focused on pragmatist thinkers, including a previous book on the Cambridge pragmatists including Ramsey and Wittgenstein presumably led her to this biography.
I think Misak's focus on Ramsey's pragmatism is natural and allows an exploration of much that is distinct about his thinking. However as the biography makes clear Ramsey was almost never orthodox in anything. He supported socialist politics but never submitted to the yoke of any one version or analysis of it. Likewise if he was a pragmatist he was his own sort and it is perhaps more accurate to say that he embraced various parts of pragmatist principles at various times.
The other people personal and professional who Ramsey interacted with make for a fascinating array of characters. From Ramsey's mother who had some progressive politics supporting feminism and the Labour party to the irritable, eccentric, dour but brilliant Wittgenstein who had various fruitful conversations with, when they were on speaking terms and so on. Ramsey's personal life and professional would intersect directly as when his father being an Cambridge don lead to his own attendance at the university. Also the personal and professional intersected less directly as when his experience being psychoanalyzed over his sexual anxieties led him to credit Freudian psychological ideas and question the simple psychological assumptions he felt underpinned some philosophical programs.
Ramsey was an atheist who shared in the libertine sexual mores of the Bloomsbury group at Cambridge at this time, although his indulgences seem limited. Still this was in marked contrast to his religiously observant and staid parents and brother. He and his wife had an open marriage and both took advantage of this, not without some minor drama. Misak's exploration of these issues comes across as honest rather than lurid. It seems clear his personal mores informed his larger social and political views about society albeit not always without contradiction or tension.
In my reading I was most interested in Ramsey's ideas on the philosophy of science where I have the most experience. (edit: I should add that I also had some knowledge of Ramsey's Cambridge classmate who became a pioneer of British computing first at Bletchley Park as a code breaker during the war and then at University of Manchester and was also a mentor of Alan Turing. Ramsey's work also intersects with Turing and Newman because of interest in the Entscheidungs problem, Turing famously was one of the people who showed it was in general impossible. I also have some knowledge of Ramsey's student physicist L. H. Thomas who went on to work as a researcher at IBM, but he does not really appear in the narrative of Ramsey's life as more than a witness.) I was intrigued by ideas in decision theory I have been thinking about that Ramsey's ideas relate to. I also found it interesting to note intersections I noticed between his ideas and John Stuart Mill. Ramsey acknowledged a strong influence from Mill as when he wrote an imaginary conversation with the philosopher for one informal talk before the Apostles, a free thinking group of Cambridge intellectuals. Reading the manuscript for this biography lead me to read some of Ramsey's papers where I found even more connections to Mill. I suspect others would different interests might be more intrigued by things like Ramsey's economic ideas or his formulation of a subjectivist explication of probability that interpreted probability as partial belief measured by the betting odds one would be willing to accept. Ramsey's varied interests and intricate mind mean his relatively short life spans many interesting issues. Even if you do not find anything of particular interest in this book, I think Misak gives a compelling account of a life with much that is inherently interesting both in terms of the direct subject's activities and the time times and place he lived in.
The citations in the book are handled as unmarked end notes, the main text is unmarred by any marks other than a few footnotes that go on some digression or other. This means that if you are attempting to use this work as reference and find the source for a quote or claim you will need to find the appropriate end note indicated by a short quote, which is cumbersome, even more so if you are reading the ebook. This ebook was in general fine, however for some reason the footnote preview function only worked for the footnotes early in the book, however there was no problem jumping from main text to the footnote (formatted as a note at the end of the current chapter) and back. There were a few typos in the text that I noticed, but in general this was rare.
This book is a comprehensive philosophical biography of Frank Ramsey. It also includes much biographical information about the man, his family and friends over the course of his short life. The focus is very much on Ramsey's work and relating his personal biography to that. However a portrait of the man and not just the philosopher is given, including his love affairs, details of his preferences for food and musical entertainment. This detail and broad ambit explains how a biography of a man who lived only 27 years manages to occupy over 800 pages.
The structure of the book is mostly diachronic beginning with a brief sketch of his parents families and how they came to meet and so Frank Ramsey came to be born. The book then follows his early development and education talking both about the general character and giving a few detailed instances as corroborative detail. His political experiences as the son of a politically active mother are discussed and his talents in all school subjects especially mathematics. However the book glides relatively quickly (in about a hundred pages or so) over the first seventeen years of his life whereupon he began his undergraduate career at Cambridge. It is here he began interacting with the thinkers (philosophers, economists and mathematicians) who would constitute his core intellectual circle and influences and began contributing to the various problems that would become his life work.
While still an undergraduate Ramsey would dispute with Keynes about the nature of probability and translate Wittgenstein's arcane and epoch making Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus from German into English. After finishing his undergraduate degree and spending six months in Vienna writing and discussing with luminaries such as Wittgenstein and members of the Vienna Circle (and being psychoanalyzed by a student of Freud), Ramsey became a fellow at King's college Cambridge teaching mathematics, but whose research was mostly in philosophy. He wrote on the foundations of mathematics giving his own take on the logicist project of Russell and Frege, he would give an important lecture on the nature of probability and truth. In economics he published two papers one of optimal taxation and the other on optimal savings. He also wrote a paper on pure mathematics on a special case of the Entscheidungs problem (showing if and how mathematical statements could be decided true of false by some mechanical process of calculation). At the time of his death Ramsey writing a book on Truth and Probability expanding on ideas and themes in an earlier paper. Some of his unpublished work would be published soon after his death including a version of his paper on Truth and Probability, other subjects included theories, causality, knowledge and related issues. These would have limited immediate impact but would often go on to be discovered later and found in various ways insightful on continuing problems in philosophy. His mathematical and economic work was likewise destined for a long after life illustrative of his penetrating and far reaching intellect. The personal details of his life, the attitude of his writing and the testimonials of his friends sketch a witty, humane and generally optimistic individual who seemed a delight to know.
Misak has enlisted the aide of various experts (philosophers, economists, mathematicians) to compose short guest (2-3 page) boxes that explain some technical detail of Ramsey's work and sketch some of its broader implications. Misak herself often deals more or less directly with technical aspects of Ramsey's work in various ways. However the main theme of her explication is the growth of pragmatist ideas and commitment in Ramsey's work. Abstract philosophical matters such as truth and belief are cast in terms of their practical effects, usefulness to humans and so on, rather than austere logical or mathematical constructions. This focus is natural for Misak whose work has focused on pragmatist thinkers, including a previous book on the Cambridge pragmatists including Ramsey and Wittgenstein presumably led her to this biography.
I think Misak's focus on Ramsey's pragmatism is natural and allows an exploration of much that is distinct about his thinking. However as the biography makes clear Ramsey was almost never orthodox in anything. He supported socialist politics but never submitted to the yoke of any one version or analysis of it. Likewise if he was a pragmatist he was his own sort and it is perhaps more accurate to say that he embraced various parts of pragmatist principles at various times.
The other people personal and professional who Ramsey interacted with make for a fascinating array of characters. From Ramsey's mother who had some progressive politics supporting feminism and the Labour party to the irritable, eccentric, dour but brilliant Wittgenstein who had various fruitful conversations with, when they were on speaking terms and so on. Ramsey's personal life and professional would intersect directly as when his father being an Cambridge don lead to his own attendance at the university. Also the personal and professional intersected less directly as when his experience being psychoanalyzed over his sexual anxieties led him to credit Freudian psychological ideas and question the simple psychological assumptions he felt underpinned some philosophical programs.
Ramsey was an atheist who shared in the libertine sexual mores of the Bloomsbury group at Cambridge at this time, although his indulgences seem limited. Still this was in marked contrast to his religiously observant and staid parents and brother. He and his wife had an open marriage and both took advantage of this, not without some minor drama. Misak's exploration of these issues comes across as honest rather than lurid. It seems clear his personal mores informed his larger social and political views about society albeit not always without contradiction or tension.
In my reading I was most interested in Ramsey's ideas on the philosophy of science where I have the most experience. (edit: I should add that I also had some knowledge of Ramsey's Cambridge classmate who became a pioneer of British computing first at Bletchley Park as a code breaker during the war and then at University of Manchester and was also a mentor of Alan Turing. Ramsey's work also intersects with Turing and Newman because of interest in the Entscheidungs problem, Turing famously was one of the people who showed it was in general impossible. I also have some knowledge of Ramsey's student physicist L. H. Thomas who went on to work as a researcher at IBM, but he does not really appear in the narrative of Ramsey's life as more than a witness.) I was intrigued by ideas in decision theory I have been thinking about that Ramsey's ideas relate to. I also found it interesting to note intersections I noticed between his ideas and John Stuart Mill. Ramsey acknowledged a strong influence from Mill as when he wrote an imaginary conversation with the philosopher for one informal talk before the Apostles, a free thinking group of Cambridge intellectuals. Reading the manuscript for this biography lead me to read some of Ramsey's papers where I found even more connections to Mill. I suspect others would different interests might be more intrigued by things like Ramsey's economic ideas or his formulation of a subjectivist explication of probability that interpreted probability as partial belief measured by the betting odds one would be willing to accept. Ramsey's varied interests and intricate mind mean his relatively short life spans many interesting issues. Even if you do not find anything of particular interest in this book, I think Misak gives a compelling account of a life with much that is inherently interesting both in terms of the direct subject's activities and the time times and place he lived in.
The citations in the book are handled as unmarked end notes, the main text is unmarred by any marks other than a few footnotes that go on some digression or other. This means that if you are attempting to use this work as reference and find the source for a quote or claim you will need to find the appropriate end note indicated by a short quote, which is cumbersome, even more so if you are reading the ebook. This ebook was in general fine, however for some reason the footnote preview function only worked for the footnotes early in the book, however there was no problem jumping from main text to the footnote (formatted as a note at the end of the current chapter) and back. There were a few typos in the text that I noticed, but in general this was rare.
May 21, 2022
A good book about maximally important ideas. She invites various technical experts to write some info boxes about mathematical matters, which is extremely admirable since the meat of Ramsey is all in the maths and the logic. Here's an essay with my gushing thoughts on his work.
* I only spotted Misak being fatuous once, taking the usual liberty where philosophers speak shit about utilitarianism as if it was for idiots:
-_- uh huh.
* How bloody erotic the (defiance of the) old morality seems from my safe remove. If you're caught you lose your job, like Empson, fired for owning condoms.
* It is tragic that he wasted months of his life (2% of it) with Freudians who were unfit to treat him -- among all people they were unfit to treat. Misak repeatedly refers to Frank being 'cured' by them. This seems inapt: at the time of the analysis, he was physically distant from his forbidden crush for 6 months and was forbidden from writing to her. Seems enough to get over it! Talking to the funny Austrian was just sauce. Maybe.
The book is another reminder of Wittgenstein's cruelty and shallowness. But his mistakes were emotionally rich, and so we keep talking about him. I cannot forgive Wittgenstein's obituary for Ramsey:
Or this
This surprised me though: on the death-bed he told jokes, with either reading (agitation or kind deflection) uncharacteristic of him:
We can evaluate the various outlooks on life and see which have the best consequences. In his assessment, the key to meaning in life is to be optimistic, thrilled, and actively try to improve conditions for people now and in the future. Live as fully and as ethically as you can, was his conclusion. Ramsey understood that inequalities get in the way of being thrilled by life. He put much effort into trying to make the world a fairer place. He also understood that individuals’ psychological makeups have an impact on whether one is depressed or not. His own tendency was to be cheerful—he was remembered as always smiling and looking rather pleased, not so much with himself but with things in general. He knew that Wittgenstein was not so disposed. But Ramsey too had periods of crippling anguish, and he thought that one should try to improve one’s life by engaging with what clinical psychology has to offer and by trying to be happy. If psychology can help change our outlook for the better, we should avail ourselves of it, as he had.
* I only spotted Misak being fatuous once, taking the usual liberty where philosophers speak shit about utilitarianism as if it was for idiots:
Ramsey was not a full-out utilitarian, to whom discounting is the obvious and correct thing to do.
-_- uh huh.
* How bloody erotic the (defiance of the) old morality seems from my safe remove. If you're caught you lose your job, like Empson, fired for owning condoms.
* It is tragic that he wasted months of his life (2% of it) with Freudians who were unfit to treat him -- among all people they were unfit to treat. Misak repeatedly refers to Frank being 'cured' by them. This seems inapt: at the time of the analysis, he was physically distant from his forbidden crush for 6 months and was forbidden from writing to her. Seems enough to get over it! Talking to the funny Austrian was just sauce. Maybe.
He also suggested to Frank that he had an Oedipus fixation, drawing on the Freudian contention that every son wants to kill his father so that he can have sex with his mother. Glover told Frank to have a talk with Margaret, and that seems to have helped: ‘I did and she was awfully nice.’ But his three months or so with Glover were on the whole not working: ‘It wasn’t really improving my mind very much, so I decided to stop it and go back to sea.’ Margaret too was being psychoanalysed, by Dr James Glover, the brother of Frank’s therapist. James Glover was also psychoanalysing Dick and Geoff. Their analysts had no qualms about discussing a patient’s analysis not only amongst themselves, but also with other patients.
[Wittgenstein] had never before said of anyone that they had understood the [Tractatus] and, as far as I know, he would never say it again.
The book is another reminder of Wittgenstein's cruelty and shallowness. But his mistakes were emotionally rich, and so we keep talking about him. I cannot forgive Wittgenstein's obituary for Ramsey:
Ramsey’s mind repulsed me. When I came to Cambridge months ago I thought that I would not be able to have dealings with him, for I had such unpleasant memories of
him from our meeting years ago with Keynes in Sussex... I could communicate quite well with
R. about some things. But in the course of time it did not really go well, after all. R’s incapacity for genuine enthusiasm or genuine reverence, which is the same, finally repulsed me more & more... his criticism didn’t help along but held back and sobered... one labored arduously for a long time in vain to explain something to him until he suddenly shrugged his shoulders about it & said this was self-evident... He had an ugly mind. But not an ugly soul. He truly relished music & with understanding. And one could see by looking at him what effect it had on him. Of the last movement of one of Beethoven’s last quartets, a movement he loved perhaps more than anything else, he told me that it made him feel as if the heavens were open.
Or this
Frank’s sisters remembered that he wrote a terrible letter to their father, saying that Arthur had failed to get Frank proper medical treatment and so was responsible for his death. The gratuitous cruelty leaves one aghast. Wittgenstein was notoriously and severely self-critical. But he seems not to have understood that extending his brand of moral self-criticism to others was itself not very moral.
This surprised me though: on the death-bed he told jokes, with either reading (agitation or kind deflection) uncharacteristic of him:
Frances said that it was clear that Wittgenstein shared with her both an immense personal sadness, as well as sympathy for Lettice. But he made poor and flippant jokes, perhaps to disguise emotions he couldn’t cope with, or perhaps to help Lettice keep her composure.
Read
March 18, 2021One big lesson I'm taking away from this biography is the influence of philosophical mood on the history of philosophy. When I was in grad school, Wittgenstein's intense, anguished life and his later way of thinking of philosophy as a kind of unending therapy was the dominant mood. It took time in other departments as a postdoc to see that another mood was possible, namely a collaborative, constructive, happy way of thinking about philosophical problems. Ramsey, in Misak's telling of his life and thought, exemplified the latter mood, and one consequence of his early death was that the Wittgensteinian mood wasn't counterbalanced by Ramsey's happy optimistic approach to philosophizing. (The fact that Ramsey went to Vienna to get psychoanalyzed by one of Freud's students who concluded, after six months of treatment, that "there'd never been anything much wrong with him" (p.177) sums up one aspect of the difference.)
Another revelation is that the behavior of academic philosophers in professional settings has not really changed in about 100 years. Consider these descriptions of behavior at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club:
You'll be glad to hear that Dr. Moore got into one of his famous rages last Friday at the Moral Sciences Club. Your friend Miss Stebbing read a paper on Whitehead's theory of objects, which was really quite good. But in the discussion afterwards she was very stupid and pig-headed about objects and events...This drove Moore quite frantic. His cross-examination of her grew more & more ferocious, louder & louder, till at last he rose up, waved his arms about, and fairly roared out 'Oh Lord! If you can't see that!' He also climbed up on his chair and looked over the back of it, writhing about and contorting himself in the most extraordinary way, groaning and spluttering all the time...I must say, Miss Stebbing stood it very well...Her voice grew colder and colder and that was all....[Stebbing] herself tore Mr. Widgery to pieces in a heartless way the week before.
The way that Wittgenstein is an important but secondary figure puts his absurd seriousness in a very different light than it appears in most accounts of his life. For example, he's constantly getting annoyed with people for small slights. For example, while hanging out with a party of people at Keynes's house, this happened:
[Wittgenstein] made Lydia burst into tears by glaring at her and asking 'What do you mean?' when she remarked that a tree was beautiful.
An absurdly appealing aspect of Ramsey's happy philosophizing is his work routine, which looks like an academic version of Marx's utopian vision of life in communist society:
Frank wrote every morning, except when he had a 9am lecture class. Holidays were no exception. When in Cambridge, he would go to his study at the top of the house straight after breakfast. He sat down and worked for three, never for more than four, hours. Then we went for walks or played tennis, after which he gave supervisions and lectures. When he was in a good groove with a piece of philosophy, he would sometimes start it up again after dinner, till the wee hours of the night. But most evenings, when they weren't at parties, he listened to music and read to Lettice. (p.253)
Another revelation is that the behavior of academic philosophers in professional settings has not really changed in about 100 years. Consider these descriptions of behavior at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club:
You'll be glad to hear that Dr. Moore got into one of his famous rages last Friday at the Moral Sciences Club. Your friend Miss Stebbing read a paper on Whitehead's theory of objects, which was really quite good. But in the discussion afterwards she was very stupid and pig-headed about objects and events...This drove Moore quite frantic. His cross-examination of her grew more & more ferocious, louder & louder, till at last he rose up, waved his arms about, and fairly roared out 'Oh Lord! If you can't see that!' He also climbed up on his chair and looked over the back of it, writhing about and contorting himself in the most extraordinary way, groaning and spluttering all the time...I must say, Miss Stebbing stood it very well...Her voice grew colder and colder and that was all....[Stebbing] herself tore Mr. Widgery to pieces in a heartless way the week before.
The way that Wittgenstein is an important but secondary figure puts his absurd seriousness in a very different light than it appears in most accounts of his life. For example, he's constantly getting annoyed with people for small slights. For example, while hanging out with a party of people at Keynes's house, this happened:
[Wittgenstein] made Lydia burst into tears by glaring at her and asking 'What do you mean?' when she remarked that a tree was beautiful.
An absurdly appealing aspect of Ramsey's happy philosophizing is his work routine, which looks like an academic version of Marx's utopian vision of life in communist society:
Frank wrote every morning, except when he had a 9am lecture class. Holidays were no exception. When in Cambridge, he would go to his study at the top of the house straight after breakfast. He sat down and worked for three, never for more than four, hours. Then we went for walks or played tennis, after which he gave supervisions and lectures. When he was in a good groove with a piece of philosophy, he would sometimes start it up again after dinner, till the wee hours of the night. But most evenings, when they weren't at parties, he listened to music and read to Lettice. (p.253)
September 20, 2020
This is one of the best intellectual biographies I have ever encountered about an amazing man who is seen as one of the greatest stars of Cambridge ever, even though he died before reaching his 27th birthday. This was an amazing person and the author has a lot to cram into this wonderful book.
There is a problem in writing a critical biography about a real genius. The issue is that to explain what makes the person a genius, the explanation will be beyond the grasp of most readers - by definition. It will also likely go beyond the grasp of most biographers as well. There is also the question of mental process. How does one explain the process by which a genius comes to realize something that everyone else misses? That condition - knowing something that nobody else (or very few others) knows would also describe delusional people as well. How to tell the difference? (I will not say anything more on this to avoid spoilers!) Think of Leibniz or Newton, who discovered Calculus at about the same time. Today, learning Calculus is an accomplishment but can be done by high school students. What about being the first to figure it out?
So what about Frank Ramsey? This is a man who became a star in at least three different highly abstract areas - philosophy and logic; mathematics; and economics. He translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English and was one of the relatively few who could work with Wittgenstein. Keynes went to him for assistance with math. He laid the groundwork for modern subjective probability theory. He wrote papers that laid the basis for government policies in taxation, savings, and welfare regulation - even though they had to be rediscovered decades after his death. He taught Alan Turing who went on to fame with the British codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park during WW2. ...all this before his 27th birthday.
The family story itself is good. He was born to a Cambridge academic family with a strong mother and a brother who became the Archbishop of Canterbury. The book is also the story of Cambridge and English intellectual life after WW1, at a time when the university was changing into its modern arrangements with departments and Ph.D. programs. The story is also about the powerful intellectual characters that crossed paths with Ramsey during his brief life.
But mostly, the book is about the ideas that came into his gifted head and which have influenced so many people who came later. Cheryl Misak is an accomplished philosopher at the University of Toronto who knows what she is writing about. He explanations of Ramsey’s ideas are clear and valuable. If anything this book is as valuable as a primer for getting up to speed on British philosophy in the early 20th century as it is a good biography. Professor Misak does the reader a greater service, however. At key points throughout the book, where Ramsay’s papers are a bit more difficult to explain, she brings in other experts in particular areas of logic or mathematics or economics to explain what is going on in a particular paper. I am grateful for her doing this. While I like to think myself a quick study, Ramsey’s papers can be rough going especially if the reader lacks background. I do not advise looking up the papers directly either (I tried) - for some it would help for others no chance. The book reads well, as smoothly as can be hoped for. The author mixes chapters with move Ramsey’s personal story along with those that focus on his particularly valuable work in his wide ranging areas of interest. Her discussion of Ramsey’s pragmatism and the problem of truth, as well as his unfinished work towards the end of the book is especially valuable.
This book is well worth reading but it is a struggle and a positive and humbling experience.
There is a problem in writing a critical biography about a real genius. The issue is that to explain what makes the person a genius, the explanation will be beyond the grasp of most readers - by definition. It will also likely go beyond the grasp of most biographers as well. There is also the question of mental process. How does one explain the process by which a genius comes to realize something that everyone else misses? That condition - knowing something that nobody else (or very few others) knows would also describe delusional people as well. How to tell the difference? (I will not say anything more on this to avoid spoilers!) Think of Leibniz or Newton, who discovered Calculus at about the same time. Today, learning Calculus is an accomplishment but can be done by high school students. What about being the first to figure it out?
So what about Frank Ramsey? This is a man who became a star in at least three different highly abstract areas - philosophy and logic; mathematics; and economics. He translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English and was one of the relatively few who could work with Wittgenstein. Keynes went to him for assistance with math. He laid the groundwork for modern subjective probability theory. He wrote papers that laid the basis for government policies in taxation, savings, and welfare regulation - even though they had to be rediscovered decades after his death. He taught Alan Turing who went on to fame with the British codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park during WW2. ...all this before his 27th birthday.
The family story itself is good. He was born to a Cambridge academic family with a strong mother and a brother who became the Archbishop of Canterbury. The book is also the story of Cambridge and English intellectual life after WW1, at a time when the university was changing into its modern arrangements with departments and Ph.D. programs. The story is also about the powerful intellectual characters that crossed paths with Ramsey during his brief life.
But mostly, the book is about the ideas that came into his gifted head and which have influenced so many people who came later. Cheryl Misak is an accomplished philosopher at the University of Toronto who knows what she is writing about. He explanations of Ramsey’s ideas are clear and valuable. If anything this book is as valuable as a primer for getting up to speed on British philosophy in the early 20th century as it is a good biography. Professor Misak does the reader a greater service, however. At key points throughout the book, where Ramsay’s papers are a bit more difficult to explain, she brings in other experts in particular areas of logic or mathematics or economics to explain what is going on in a particular paper. I am grateful for her doing this. While I like to think myself a quick study, Ramsey’s papers can be rough going especially if the reader lacks background. I do not advise looking up the papers directly either (I tried) - for some it would help for others no chance. The book reads well, as smoothly as can be hoped for. The author mixes chapters with move Ramsey’s personal story along with those that focus on his particularly valuable work in his wide ranging areas of interest. Her discussion of Ramsey’s pragmatism and the problem of truth, as well as his unfinished work towards the end of the book is especially valuable.
This book is well worth reading but it is a struggle and a positive and humbling experience.
April 3, 2020
Ramsey was a brilliant student, and I enjoyed reading about his academic career at boarding school (Winchester) and at Cambridge in the years during and after World War I. He was a member of the famous “Apostles” society at Cambridge, knew all the Bloomsbury types including Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, and had an “open” marriage. So lots of interesting material. Where the book dragged badly for me was the detailed treatment of his work in philosophy and economics, where the author never quite convinced me that he should be better known today.
Want to read
April 28, 2020"To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not is true"
-- Aristotle.
"When several hypotheses are presented to our mind which we believe to be mutually
exclusive and exhaustive, but about which we know nothing further, we distribute our belief
equally among them .... This being admitted as an account of the way in which we actually
do distribute our belief in simple cases, the whole of the subsequent theory follows as a
deduction of the way in which we must distribute it in complex cases if we would be
consistent"
-- W. F. Donkits.
"The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know,
something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premises, and not otherwise"
-- C. S. Peirce.
"Truth can never be told so as to beunderstood, and not be believed"
-- W. Blake.
"Part of our knowledge we obtain direct; and part by argument. The Theory of Probability is concerned with that part which we obtain by argument, and it treats of the different degrees in which the results so obtained are conclusive or inconclusive"
In Keynes' Treatise on Probability
Quotes extracted from "Truth and probability"(1926) by Frank Plumpton Ramsey, Fellow and Director of Studies in Mathematics at King's College, Lecturer in Mathematics in the University of Cambridge
"You can't handle the truth"
Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men"(1992)
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/Movi...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20... toeLPJdUbexna2oneLmSzXifbiJQyKgY
-- Aristotle.
"When several hypotheses are presented to our mind which we believe to be mutually
exclusive and exhaustive, but about which we know nothing further, we distribute our belief
equally among them .... This being admitted as an account of the way in which we actually
do distribute our belief in simple cases, the whole of the subsequent theory follows as a
deduction of the way in which we must distribute it in complex cases if we would be
consistent"
-- W. F. Donkits.
"The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know,
something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premises, and not otherwise"
-- C. S. Peirce.
"Truth can never be told so as to beunderstood, and not be believed"
-- W. Blake.
"Part of our knowledge we obtain direct; and part by argument. The Theory of Probability is concerned with that part which we obtain by argument, and it treats of the different degrees in which the results so obtained are conclusive or inconclusive"
In Keynes' Treatise on Probability
Quotes extracted from "Truth and probability"(1926) by Frank Plumpton Ramsey, Fellow and Director of Studies in Mathematics at King's College, Lecturer in Mathematics in the University of Cambridge
"You can't handle the truth"
Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men"(1992)
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/Movi...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20... toeLPJdUbexna2oneLmSzXifbiJQyKgY
December 9, 2024
“Any biography of Frank Ramsey must start with, and be haunted by, his death”.
Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, has a life span but one tenth that of our sun; it’s a somewhat poetic principle in astronomy that the most luminous stars burn out the fastest. This cosmic principle seems to be mirrored in human experience. Alexander the Great, who conquered vast territories and redefined the ancient world, died at the age of 32. In the realm of music: Otis Redding at 25, Buddy Holly at 22, Tupac at 25. The arts have seen similar losses, with Jean-Michel Basquiat passing at 27 and Egon Schiele at 28. In mathematics, one is reminded of the 32 years life of that strange genius Ramanujan (chronicled in The Man Who Knew Infinity), to whom the Hindu goddess Namagiri whispered mathematical truth.
Yet in one of those tragic oversights of history, Frank Ramsey is seldom counted in such company. That a mind so fine, a heart so gentle, and someone so deeply human should perish at the age of 26, just when he was fully coming into his powers… puts a blanket of melancholy on the reader that is hard to shake off even after finishing the book.
Ramsey was a precocious youth (though not a child prodigy) who developed a voracious reading appetite at Winchester, before matriculating at Trinity College Cambridge in 1920, aged 17. At 19, while still an undergraduate, he translated Wittgenstein’s notoriously recondite Tractactus from German into English, and delivered a deep critique of Keynes’ Treatise on Probability which rattled Keynes and largely convinced the intellectual public that Keynes was incorrect. Notably, none of these side activities got in the way of Ramsey graduating as the Senior Wrangler at the age of 20. He became a fellow at King’s College shortly after, and became perhaps the only mind that could go head-to-head with Wittgenstein, Keynes, Moore, and Russell, each in their respective fields of expertise. All this while raising a family and being an active participant in the polygamous and free-thinking Bloomsbury Circle.
Ramsey’s contributions are hard to understate. The general pattern is that he brought a fierce creativity to each of the fields that he graced with his presence; his work was often decades ahead of its time, and formed subfields that created rich fields of future study.
In mathematics, we have Ramsey Theory, one famous result being that at any party with six people, there will be at least three mutual acquaintances or three mutual strangers. In probability, Ramsey developed subjective Bayesianism (commonly attributed to Bruno de Finetti rather than Ramsey), which treats probability as subjective degrees of belief that can be measured by considering betting odds. In philosophy, Ramsey wrestled with some of the hard problems of Truth and Belief, not to mention his role in translating, interpreting, and challenging Wittgenstein. Indeed, Misak believes that the death of Ramsey was perhaps the catalyst that sparked the creation of the Later Wittgenstein.
Economics was something of a side hobby for Ramsey ��� he would dip into it briefly when life got too busy for him to do proper mathematics or philosophy. These sojourns were enormously productive! His papers o`n optimal taxation and optimal saving sparked the creation of two new subfields that have undoubtedly influenced economic policy. These two papers, which Ramsey was initially reluctant to publish because he felt were too simple, were both selected by the Economic Journal in their 125th anniversary edition – “one of the world’s best journals of economics decided that two of its thirteen most important papers were written by Frank Ramsey when he was twenty-five years old.”. Misak puts it well: “he roamed freely over philosophy, mathematics, logic, probability theory, and economics. Perhaps no one would ever again do so with such intelligence and skill”.
Ramsey’s intellect is undeniable, but I am moved more by his humanism. Eulogies wax lyrical about the graciousness of his character, his warm laughter, and his genuine interest in people. Unlike Wittgenstein, Ramsey was not a philosopher in an ivory tower, gnawing deeply on abstract problems and needing to be seen as the deepest thinker on a topic. He respected common sense, and much of his thinking was ultimately directed at the betterment of society. One gets the feeling that had he lived longer, Ramsey would have been a resounding force for humanism in the 20th century.
This is the rare biography for which I can confidently articulate the standalone merits, even setting aside my admiration for its subject. Drawing from new primary sources, Misak critiques some of the existing narratives around Ramsey, hinting that the jealousy of his contemporaries played a part in the shaping of his legacy. The brief expositions of technicals concepts, provided by relevant experts, give a glimpse of the intellectual mountains that Ramsey scaled. Misak also indulges the reader with “what if” speculations – a particularly tragic one being “the most spectacular near-miss in the foundations of mathematics”, involving Ramsey and Alan Turing. Both became King’s College fellows at 22, shared an interest in the foundations of mathematics (and in fact lectured the same course), and both shared untimely fates. Had Ramsey not died a year before Turing matriculated, he would have undoubtedly been Turing’s supervisor at King’s. What heights could they have achieved together? Would Ramsey’s contributions have changed the course of the war? And what about Turing’s subsequent post-war research into computing? While such counterfactual speculations may never amount to anything, they do inspire reflection on the potentiality of life.
How does history choose who to lay its eyes on? Ramsey was certainly in the “room where it happened”, but perhaps by being shoulder-to-shoulder with giants like Keynes, Wittgenstein, and Russell, he graciously consigned himself to the sidelines of history. Or was it the fact that Ramsey was so far ahead of his time? Philosopher Donald Davidson coined "the Ramsey Effect" to describe the realisation that one’s splendid new philosophical discovery already existed within Ramsey's body of work. In either case, Misak has made a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy, deftly weaving together Ramsey’s ideas, personal relationships, and the intellectual milieu in which he shone so brightly, if all too briefly.
My highlights here.
Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, has a life span but one tenth that of our sun; it’s a somewhat poetic principle in astronomy that the most luminous stars burn out the fastest. This cosmic principle seems to be mirrored in human experience. Alexander the Great, who conquered vast territories and redefined the ancient world, died at the age of 32. In the realm of music: Otis Redding at 25, Buddy Holly at 22, Tupac at 25. The arts have seen similar losses, with Jean-Michel Basquiat passing at 27 and Egon Schiele at 28. In mathematics, one is reminded of the 32 years life of that strange genius Ramanujan (chronicled in The Man Who Knew Infinity), to whom the Hindu goddess Namagiri whispered mathematical truth.
Yet in one of those tragic oversights of history, Frank Ramsey is seldom counted in such company. That a mind so fine, a heart so gentle, and someone so deeply human should perish at the age of 26, just when he was fully coming into his powers… puts a blanket of melancholy on the reader that is hard to shake off even after finishing the book.
Ramsey was a precocious youth (though not a child prodigy) who developed a voracious reading appetite at Winchester, before matriculating at Trinity College Cambridge in 1920, aged 17. At 19, while still an undergraduate, he translated Wittgenstein’s notoriously recondite Tractactus from German into English, and delivered a deep critique of Keynes’ Treatise on Probability which rattled Keynes and largely convinced the intellectual public that Keynes was incorrect. Notably, none of these side activities got in the way of Ramsey graduating as the Senior Wrangler at the age of 20. He became a fellow at King’s College shortly after, and became perhaps the only mind that could go head-to-head with Wittgenstein, Keynes, Moore, and Russell, each in their respective fields of expertise. All this while raising a family and being an active participant in the polygamous and free-thinking Bloomsbury Circle.
Ramsey’s contributions are hard to understate. The general pattern is that he brought a fierce creativity to each of the fields that he graced with his presence; his work was often decades ahead of its time, and formed subfields that created rich fields of future study.
In mathematics, we have Ramsey Theory, one famous result being that at any party with six people, there will be at least three mutual acquaintances or three mutual strangers. In probability, Ramsey developed subjective Bayesianism (commonly attributed to Bruno de Finetti rather than Ramsey), which treats probability as subjective degrees of belief that can be measured by considering betting odds. In philosophy, Ramsey wrestled with some of the hard problems of Truth and Belief, not to mention his role in translating, interpreting, and challenging Wittgenstein. Indeed, Misak believes that the death of Ramsey was perhaps the catalyst that sparked the creation of the Later Wittgenstein.
Economics was something of a side hobby for Ramsey ��� he would dip into it briefly when life got too busy for him to do proper mathematics or philosophy. These sojourns were enormously productive! His papers o`n optimal taxation and optimal saving sparked the creation of two new subfields that have undoubtedly influenced economic policy. These two papers, which Ramsey was initially reluctant to publish because he felt were too simple, were both selected by the Economic Journal in their 125th anniversary edition – “one of the world’s best journals of economics decided that two of its thirteen most important papers were written by Frank Ramsey when he was twenty-five years old.”. Misak puts it well: “he roamed freely over philosophy, mathematics, logic, probability theory, and economics. Perhaps no one would ever again do so with such intelligence and skill”.
Ramsey’s intellect is undeniable, but I am moved more by his humanism. Eulogies wax lyrical about the graciousness of his character, his warm laughter, and his genuine interest in people. Unlike Wittgenstein, Ramsey was not a philosopher in an ivory tower, gnawing deeply on abstract problems and needing to be seen as the deepest thinker on a topic. He respected common sense, and much of his thinking was ultimately directed at the betterment of society. One gets the feeling that had he lived longer, Ramsey would have been a resounding force for humanism in the 20th century.
This is the rare biography for which I can confidently articulate the standalone merits, even setting aside my admiration for its subject. Drawing from new primary sources, Misak critiques some of the existing narratives around Ramsey, hinting that the jealousy of his contemporaries played a part in the shaping of his legacy. The brief expositions of technicals concepts, provided by relevant experts, give a glimpse of the intellectual mountains that Ramsey scaled. Misak also indulges the reader with “what if” speculations – a particularly tragic one being “the most spectacular near-miss in the foundations of mathematics”, involving Ramsey and Alan Turing. Both became King’s College fellows at 22, shared an interest in the foundations of mathematics (and in fact lectured the same course), and both shared untimely fates. Had Ramsey not died a year before Turing matriculated, he would have undoubtedly been Turing’s supervisor at King’s. What heights could they have achieved together? Would Ramsey’s contributions have changed the course of the war? And what about Turing’s subsequent post-war research into computing? While such counterfactual speculations may never amount to anything, they do inspire reflection on the potentiality of life.
How does history choose who to lay its eyes on? Ramsey was certainly in the “room where it happened”, but perhaps by being shoulder-to-shoulder with giants like Keynes, Wittgenstein, and Russell, he graciously consigned himself to the sidelines of history. Or was it the fact that Ramsey was so far ahead of his time? Philosopher Donald Davidson coined "the Ramsey Effect" to describe the realisation that one’s splendid new philosophical discovery already existed within Ramsey's body of work. In either case, Misak has made a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy, deftly weaving together Ramsey’s ideas, personal relationships, and the intellectual milieu in which he shone so brightly, if all too briefly.
My highlights here.
August 7, 2020
'...his chuckle was the chuckling of a god.'
April 11, 2020
While I haven't finished this, I am fifty pages from the end of the main body and I don't think it necessary to finish this book to exclaim how profoundly grateful I am to Cheryl Misak for having written this masterpiece. The subject matter, the biography of Frank Ramsey, is endlessly interesting, but equally important is Ms. Misak's handling of the "life and times" of Ramsey.
We are infinitely better for having read this biography, with its thoughtful explanation of the fields of interest, and the accomplishments, of Frank Ramsey, that is, philosophy, mathematics and economics.
Magnificent. I have learned from and enjoyed this book for the last week. I will regret finishing it this afternoon. Can I say anymore?
We are infinitely better for having read this biography, with its thoughtful explanation of the fields of interest, and the accomplishments, of Frank Ramsey, that is, philosophy, mathematics and economics.
Magnificent. I have learned from and enjoyed this book for the last week. I will regret finishing it this afternoon. Can I say anymore?
June 1, 2020
'In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me ... On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one's activities.'
Whenever I walk through Cambridge while visiting my sister, I can't help but daydream about this generation and smile.
Whenever I walk through Cambridge while visiting my sister, I can't help but daydream about this generation and smile.
September 18, 2020
Maybe my rating is a bit harsh. The topic of this biography is one of the most brilliant men of the 20th century (see my recent tweets), he made fundamental contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics in a very short life.
The problem is that if you're not familiar with the topics to which Ramsey contributed, you will probably not get much out of the book. The endless discussions of his sex life do not compensate for this.
The problem is that if you're not familiar with the topics to which Ramsey contributed, you will probably not get much out of the book. The endless discussions of his sex life do not compensate for this.
December 13, 2021
Brilliant book about a most remarkable mind. Especially enjoyed the Wittgenstein relationship.
January 31, 2025
No tiene la prosa de Monk, pero es una biografía excelente que hace justicia a la estrella fugaz que fue Ramsey.
April 9, 2021
‘Who was Frank Ramsey?’
‘Any biography of Frank Ramsey must start with, and be haunted by, his death. He was one of the most powerful and influential thinkers Cambridge ever produced. Yet he died just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday.’
Frank Plumpton Ramsey (22 February 1903 – 19 January 1930) was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and was instrumental in translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. Frank Ramsey was also influenced by, and influenced, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell.
I was intrigued: how did someone who died so tragically young achieve so much? And why do I know so little about him? I picked up the book and started reading. Ms Misak describes the world Frank Ramsey inhabited, his family, and his beliefs. I was intrigued by his interactions with John Maynard Keynes, less interested in his belief in free love, fascinated by his achievements.
I do not pretend to understand all of Mr Ramsey’s achievements. I was familiar with some of his work on economic theory (from my studies in the early 1970s), but that is all. Ms Misak presents his ideas in a way that non-expert readers like me can appreciate their breadth and depth without becoming lost in technicalities.
I enjoyed reading this book, about the achievements of a young man whose contribution to the fields of economics, mathematics and philosophy should be celebrated by specialists and non-specialists alike.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
‘Any biography of Frank Ramsey must start with, and be haunted by, his death. He was one of the most powerful and influential thinkers Cambridge ever produced. Yet he died just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday.’
Frank Plumpton Ramsey (22 February 1903 – 19 January 1930) was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and was instrumental in translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. Frank Ramsey was also influenced by, and influenced, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell.
I was intrigued: how did someone who died so tragically young achieve so much? And why do I know so little about him? I picked up the book and started reading. Ms Misak describes the world Frank Ramsey inhabited, his family, and his beliefs. I was intrigued by his interactions with John Maynard Keynes, less interested in his belief in free love, fascinated by his achievements.
I do not pretend to understand all of Mr Ramsey’s achievements. I was familiar with some of his work on economic theory (from my studies in the early 1970s), but that is all. Ms Misak presents his ideas in a way that non-expert readers like me can appreciate their breadth and depth without becoming lost in technicalities.
I enjoyed reading this book, about the achievements of a young man whose contribution to the fields of economics, mathematics and philosophy should be celebrated by specialists and non-specialists alike.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
January 2, 2022
Fantastisk biografi, likte spesielt godt innovasjonen med å ha fagfolk som forklarer ideene i dybden uten å dumme det ned. Det gjør Ramsey til en enda mer imponerende figur også.
Av alle what ifs i moderne intellektuell historie må dette være den største. Mannen døde i en alder av 26 men rakk å komme med banebrytende resultater i både matematikk, filosofi og økonomi. Den eneste personen jeg kan sammenlikne ham med er von neumann.
Av alle what ifs i moderne intellektuell historie må dette være den største. Mannen døde i en alder av 26 men rakk å komme med banebrytende resultater i både matematikk, filosofi og økonomi. Den eneste personen jeg kan sammenlikne ham med er von neumann.
December 11, 2020
سبب القراءة المفاجئة للكتاب العظيم دا هو المقال دا .
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
انا مهتم برامزى من ساعة ما قريت مقطع عنه فى كتاب ..the man who loved only numbers , كتاب لطيف عن بول ايردوش .
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
انا مهتم برامزى من ساعة ما قريت مقطع عنه فى كتاب ..the man who loved only numbers , كتاب لطيف عن بول ايردوش .
May 4, 2023
I wish I could give this 6 stars! As a biography, it was so well written - incredibly well informed, with fantastic attention paid to the details of Ramsey’s work. The author got scholars in the respective fields to write chapters on some of Ramsey’s greatest contributions to math, philosophy, and economics, and I think that was a really unique and good choice.
Ramsey himself was an incredible man, and learning about his life and work was so enjoyable! I have to actually read his papers now.
Ramsey himself was an incredible man, and learning about his life and work was so enjoyable! I have to actually read his papers now.
March 29, 2021
Frank Ramsey was a for-the-ages genius who died young (in 1930 at age 26). His economic insights are still part of the cutting edge today, and though his work in philosophy hasn't held up as well, it's clear he still had much more to offer, and much further to go.
Cheryl Misak's book, though, can't quite hold up for 429 pages because, after all, Ramsey died very young. Out of necessity, she spends a lot of time on ancillary topics, but in the end, it's too much time -- and the structure of the book itself makes it hard to appreciate his brilliance.
But first, the most interesting aspect of the book and Ramsey's life in general was his close association with the radical Bloomsbury Group of post-World War I England. The most famous literary names today are Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, but also involved was the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was bisexual, and the sexual freedom of the group in what was still a Victorian country was part of its allure, along with its poetical, dramatic and literary output.
Ramsey was close with Keynes and his wife Lettice was on the periphery of the Group, which adds to his importance at the time. And in terms of philosophy, Ramsey's influence, even in his early 20s, was immense. Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, respected him greatly, and his comments and critiques of their work were taken to heart by both.
Unfortunately, Wittgenstein and his outsized personality take over much of the book, as Ramsey, for all his intellectual prowess, comes across a nice but somewhat dull fellow who, at age 16, would spend his days reading philosophy in German.
Another difficulty for Misak is the sheer complexity of the ideas Ramsey was dealing with. She tries to solve the problem by inserting brief essays by experts to try bring the esoteric concepts back to earth, but the essays are far too brief, and thus way too complex and completely unsatisfying. (I'm fairly familiar with Wittgenstein's work, but even those commentaries were less than illuminating, while the economic and mathematical ones were pretty much incomprehensible.)
In the end, "Frank Ramsey" succeeds on several counts (describing his place in the intellectual ferment of the time, for one) and fails on several others (describing the ideas that gave him that place, for one). And given its length, and Misak's somewhat pedestrian prose, the book never quite catches fire.
But its portrait of Cambridge and English intellectual life in the 20s shines a light on an intersection of art and deep thought that produced much great work -- though it is clearly a shame, if not a tragedy, that Ramsey did not live long enough to produce his own magnum opus.
Cheryl Misak's book, though, can't quite hold up for 429 pages because, after all, Ramsey died very young. Out of necessity, she spends a lot of time on ancillary topics, but in the end, it's too much time -- and the structure of the book itself makes it hard to appreciate his brilliance.
But first, the most interesting aspect of the book and Ramsey's life in general was his close association with the radical Bloomsbury Group of post-World War I England. The most famous literary names today are Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, but also involved was the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was bisexual, and the sexual freedom of the group in what was still a Victorian country was part of its allure, along with its poetical, dramatic and literary output.
Ramsey was close with Keynes and his wife Lettice was on the periphery of the Group, which adds to his importance at the time. And in terms of philosophy, Ramsey's influence, even in his early 20s, was immense. Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, respected him greatly, and his comments and critiques of their work were taken to heart by both.
Unfortunately, Wittgenstein and his outsized personality take over much of the book, as Ramsey, for all his intellectual prowess, comes across a nice but somewhat dull fellow who, at age 16, would spend his days reading philosophy in German.
Another difficulty for Misak is the sheer complexity of the ideas Ramsey was dealing with. She tries to solve the problem by inserting brief essays by experts to try bring the esoteric concepts back to earth, but the essays are far too brief, and thus way too complex and completely unsatisfying. (I'm fairly familiar with Wittgenstein's work, but even those commentaries were less than illuminating, while the economic and mathematical ones were pretty much incomprehensible.)
In the end, "Frank Ramsey" succeeds on several counts (describing his place in the intellectual ferment of the time, for one) and fails on several others (describing the ideas that gave him that place, for one). And given its length, and Misak's somewhat pedestrian prose, the book never quite catches fire.
But its portrait of Cambridge and English intellectual life in the 20s shines a light on an intersection of art and deep thought that produced much great work -- though it is clearly a shame, if not a tragedy, that Ramsey did not live long enough to produce his own magnum opus.
January 16, 2021
I enjoyed this book on the whole, but there were some slog sections and at worst it felt cobbled together and in need of more editing to smooth it out. I like that the drama of Ramsey's life wasn't played up more than was necessary (I'm reading boys in the boat with my 8yr old and that's a good example of over dramatization).
Great thinkers should be lauded. The same with great artists. Do we really find the robber barons interesting in hindsight? Good, then we can burn all the Steve jobs books.
I felt a connection to him as a hiker/scrambler and the part about a classmate falling to his death while they vacationed - and then they just continued the vacation was explained away as part of the times. People lost siblings, death wasn't as heavy? I don't know.
The major notes of his life are played in time without jamming or solos. The explanations of his contributions to philosophy, economics, and mathematics are often given in blocked off sections (like a dummys book) by various collegiate faculty. These are hit or miss. The attempt is made to make these complicated problems simple and understandable to a layman, but their value as snippets is questionable. His death is saved for the very last chapter, of course. Very little conjecture on theorizing what really got him - botched unnecessary surgery, or liver disease - author settles on Weil's disease. He picked up a pathogen swimming in unseasonably warm water. What kills me is when the author says Joseph Lister invented antibiotics and they were only available by 1940. Lister was long dead at that point (author says discovered by him in 1928, but he died in 1912) and his contribution was antiseptics in surgery. It was Fleming that invented antibiotics and availability was not widespread until after the war effort. I found a pretty bad typo in the last chapter as well. I didn't mark it and can't find it now, but it was bad. Left a bad taste.
Great thinkers should be lauded. The same with great artists. Do we really find the robber barons interesting in hindsight? Good, then we can burn all the Steve jobs books.
I felt a connection to him as a hiker/scrambler and the part about a classmate falling to his death while they vacationed - and then they just continued the vacation was explained away as part of the times. People lost siblings, death wasn't as heavy? I don't know.
The major notes of his life are played in time without jamming or solos. The explanations of his contributions to philosophy, economics, and mathematics are often given in blocked off sections (like a dummys book) by various collegiate faculty. These are hit or miss. The attempt is made to make these complicated problems simple and understandable to a layman, but their value as snippets is questionable. His death is saved for the very last chapter, of course. Very little conjecture on theorizing what really got him - botched unnecessary surgery, or liver disease - author settles on Weil's disease. He picked up a pathogen swimming in unseasonably warm water. What kills me is when the author says Joseph Lister invented antibiotics and they were only available by 1940. Lister was long dead at that point (author says discovered by him in 1928, but he died in 1912) and his contribution was antiseptics in surgery. It was Fleming that invented antibiotics and availability was not widespread until after the war effort. I found a pretty bad typo in the last chapter as well. I didn't mark it and can't find it now, but it was bad. Left a bad taste.
March 16, 2024
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: the high rating I gave this biography of the English philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) isn’t meant to be a surrogate for my opinions on Ramsey’s philosophy itself. Yes, it helped me out that Misak paints Ramsey’s influence, within the analytic tradition of philosophy, as being in the direction of humanism and pragmatism; if his influence had been in the opposite direction, I might not have been so happy to read hundreds of pages about him. But, I’ve really read very little of Ramsey’s own writing, and anyway I first knew about him as a mathematician, rather than a philosopher (he’s the namesake of the mathematical branch simply known as Ramsey Theory); what I’m really saying is that Misak did a great job as a biographer.
It’s not that her subject was lacking in interest in his own right, I mean; as her subtitle suggests, in addition to his professional contributions to philosophy and mathematics, Frank Ramsey was also an economist, a socialist, a friend of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists… and did it all before his death at age 26. Ramsey apparently saw himself primarily as a philosopher, which is also Misak’s background. However, even as someone with an interest in philosophy, I found the most impressive parts of this biography to be not the details of Ramsey’s ideas packed into the second half of the book, often aided by contributions from outside experts, but Misak’s descriptions of Ramsey as he was coming up as an outstanding student in the milieu of Cambridge, where he was born, went to university and spent most of his life. Misak explains in her introduction that she will refer to her subject as “Frank” when speaking of his personal life, and “Ramsey” when speaking of his professional life; on the whole, then, I preferred Frank to Ramsey. But her description of the philosophical currents during Ramsey’s undergraduate years at Cambridge was thrilling, not the least of which consisted of Ramsey’s own contributions and responses to them.
As a matter of fact, it seems from this biography that a lot of the intellectual influence Ramsey had was social, on Ludwig Wittgenstein (whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ramsey translated as an undergraduate, in the translation generally attributed to C.K. Ogden) and others, and that his conversation was a prime vector of his thought. In her final chapter, Misak describes him as a problem-solver, and it did in fact strike me throughout the book how, all too often, the problems Ramsey was solving were set by others. It seems that his philosophy never really did have the chance to get to hang together in its own right; he was partway through what was to be his first book at the time of his death. Misak even speaks of Ramsey’s doubts about some of the presuppositions on which his own work was based. Regarding a pair of papers he wrote on the suggestion of his friend and mentor, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes:
I would, on the contrary, have preferred for Ramsey’s socialism, for example, to make a more extended appearance in his academic work. So, seemingly, would Misak, a few pages later: “Ramsey’s early death robbed him of the opportunity to stand back and make his background convictions clear in his handling of economic problems. … [W]e know what he thought about unfettered capitalism in his time. With Marshall, Pigou and Keynes, he thought that it needed heavy regulation.” In fact, a common theme in Misak’s treatment of Ramsey the academic seems to be his misunderstanding by those who use his work for goals opposite to those in which she argues he in fact believed.
To me, the most interesting contribution Ramsey made to philosophy, at least as far as I can glean from Misak, is described in this contribution by outside expert Colin Howson:
That’s simply an approach to the philosophy of subjectivity and objectivity that I’d never encountered before, and spurred me on to attempt to read the paper of Ramsey’s supposedly containing this idea, “Truth and Probability”. Ramsey apparently considered this one of his most important papers, as can be inferred from the fact that his never-completed book was to bear the same title.
Ultimately, though, Misak makes the point well that Frank Ramsey was much more than an academic, as influential as his academic career was. His experience in psychoanalysis (and defenses of Freud), for instance, are well described, as are his open marriage and, occasionally, his prejudices. Possibly even more important than that is the impression she communicates that he was simply a great person to be around. Here she quotes Henry Lintott on Frank:
And, isn’t that the kind of person you’d want to spend your biographical time with?
It’s not that her subject was lacking in interest in his own right, I mean; as her subtitle suggests, in addition to his professional contributions to philosophy and mathematics, Frank Ramsey was also an economist, a socialist, a friend of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists… and did it all before his death at age 26. Ramsey apparently saw himself primarily as a philosopher, which is also Misak’s background. However, even as someone with an interest in philosophy, I found the most impressive parts of this biography to be not the details of Ramsey’s ideas packed into the second half of the book, often aided by contributions from outside experts, but Misak’s descriptions of Ramsey as he was coming up as an outstanding student in the milieu of Cambridge, where he was born, went to university and spent most of his life. Misak explains in her introduction that she will refer to her subject as “Frank” when speaking of his personal life, and “Ramsey” when speaking of his professional life; on the whole, then, I preferred Frank to Ramsey. But her description of the philosophical currents during Ramsey’s undergraduate years at Cambridge was thrilling, not the least of which consisted of Ramsey’s own contributions and responses to them.
As a matter of fact, it seems from this biography that a lot of the intellectual influence Ramsey had was social, on Ludwig Wittgenstein (whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ramsey translated as an undergraduate, in the translation generally attributed to C.K. Ogden) and others, and that his conversation was a prime vector of his thought. In her final chapter, Misak describes him as a problem-solver, and it did in fact strike me throughout the book how, all too often, the problems Ramsey was solving were set by others. It seems that his philosophy never really did have the chance to get to hang together in its own right; he was partway through what was to be his first book at the time of his death. Misak even speaks of Ramsey’s doubts about some of the presuppositions on which his own work was based. Regarding a pair of papers he wrote on the suggestion of his friend and mentor, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes:
The fact that the average of the very poor person’s and the very rich person’s utility is a malformed measure is a major problem for utilitarian economic analyses. … Ramsey thought such measures would not get us anywhere near an accurate calculation. Nonetheless, in his two papers for the Economic Journal, he produced utilitarian analyses in which he either neglected “altogether questions of distribution and considerations arising from the differences in the marginal utility of money to different people” or introduced inequality among families in a brief extension of his intertemporal analysis, in order to show how his preceding analysis could be easily extended to different situations.
I would, on the contrary, have preferred for Ramsey’s socialism, for example, to make a more extended appearance in his academic work. So, seemingly, would Misak, a few pages later: “Ramsey’s early death robbed him of the opportunity to stand back and make his background convictions clear in his handling of economic problems. … [W]e know what he thought about unfettered capitalism in his time. With Marshall, Pigou and Keynes, he thought that it needed heavy regulation.” In fact, a common theme in Misak’s treatment of Ramsey the academic seems to be his misunderstanding by those who use his work for goals opposite to those in which she argues he in fact believed.
To me, the most interesting contribution Ramsey made to philosophy, at least as far as I can glean from Misak, is described in this contribution by outside expert Colin Howson:
[I]n fairly general circumstances, agents with different initial, or prior, probability functions will, with enough new information, find their updated probabilities converging; in this way, it is claimed, objectivity is realized as an emergent property of consistent subjective assignments.”
That’s simply an approach to the philosophy of subjectivity and objectivity that I’d never encountered before, and spurred me on to attempt to read the paper of Ramsey’s supposedly containing this idea, “Truth and Probability”. Ramsey apparently considered this one of his most important papers, as can be inferred from the fact that his never-completed book was to bear the same title.
Ultimately, though, Misak makes the point well that Frank Ramsey was much more than an academic, as influential as his academic career was. His experience in psychoanalysis (and defenses of Freud), for instance, are well described, as are his open marriage and, occasionally, his prejudices. Possibly even more important than that is the impression she communicates that he was simply a great person to be around. Here she quotes Henry Lintott on Frank:
He was universally loved. I don’t think that would be putting it too strongly… He was one of the nicest and most lovable people it’s possible to know… the combination of charm and intelligence to that extent is very rare… almost too good to be true.
And, isn’t that the kind of person you’d want to spend your biographical time with?
October 29, 2021
Frank Ramsey was certainly an exceptional individual and deserves a biography. That his life was cut short before many of his contributions to philosophy, math, and economics were recognized and fully developed shouldn't be counted against him, but the reality upon reading this book is that many ideas he contributed to are really just that - ideas that Ramsey provided a spark for and for which he's not per se the most critical part of the story. Overall, the book ended up a bit dry and didn't bring as many of the "oh wow" moments I expected. Maybe, that's because I'm not a PhD who can appreciate the breadth and depth of Ramsey's genius, but if you're not either, the book may end up more of a sleep aid than before-bed page turner.
September 15, 2020
An incredibly well-researched and well-written biography of an important but little-known figure in philosophy, economics and mathematics in the early 20th Century.
The author was incredibly lucky to have found a cache of interviews done in the 1980's with a variety of people who knew Ramsey, which added a huge amount of texture to the story. Also, the author brings a strong background in the relevant philosophy (and she farmed out accounts of the more technical details to a variety of experts).
All in all, a fine book.
The author was incredibly lucky to have found a cache of interviews done in the 1980's with a variety of people who knew Ramsey, which added a huge amount of texture to the story. Also, the author brings a strong background in the relevant philosophy (and she farmed out accounts of the more technical details to a variety of experts).
All in all, a fine book.
December 3, 2021
I am writing two days after finishing this book, and my head still spins thinking about it.
One of the chief pleasures I take in good biographies is getting to encounter an individual, regarded as titanic, on a human level. In this way, Walter Isaacson has done society a great service. I consider him to be our best biographer (while second place is not even close) mostly because he is able to translate greatness onto the page without valorizing the individual to such an extent that we lose who they were as a person. What is more, he is able to do this without being an expert within the field that his subject is from (e.g. he is not a physicist and yet has certainly given us Einstein's best biography).
Misak achieves this perfectly, but does so accomplishing something most biographers are never forced to do: she had to demonstrate Ramsey's greatness. Frank Ramsey is a cultural non-entity who is appreciated only within the boundaries of the fields that he so profoundly affected. We have no comprehensive account of his achievements, and as such, society as a whole has not appreciated what he meant to its history. This book makes the case for his greatness (based on how he revolutionized not one, but three fields), all while making the case for how devastatingly human he was. We get to see how powerful Ramsey's mind was, but also the easy grace with which he achieved his breakthroughs. What is more, Misak relays just how admirable he was as a human being. I would want to spend time with Ramsey which is often not the case with our heroes and titans.
Here is an excerpt from an article by Michael Bevan at the Oxonian Review (link at the end of this review) that is so well put it deserves to be shared in its original form:
"The backside of over-valorising the subject in biography is that ordinary human beings are suddenly seen as incapable of inheriting their legacy. (This is just a consequence of the fact that to make the past into an age of heroes is almost unavoidably to make the present into an age of decay). To the extent that Misak has avoided this, by avoiding such valorisation, she has been able, besides offering a detailed and compelling account of Ramsey’s life, to make us feel as if we are of the same species as Ramsey—even if his contemporaries were occasionally less than sure. The possibility is then left open that mere humans might yet be capable of following him and, importantly, without needing to posture as an eccentric, a character, or anything like that. He did not need to be unearthly to be great and, therefore, neither do we."
Beyond Misak's general approach, the construction and execution of her writing from page to page is exquisite. While the overall progression of the book is chronological, she has the dexterity and sophistication to be able to deviate from this approach to discuss a topic in more depth, or explore a related idea that enhances her original point. This sometimes involved jumping forwards or backwards in time. At multiple junctures, this involved the use of "guest boxes" where experts in the field in question could explore Ramsey's ideas, often in highly technical terms that will only be familiar to those in that particular field. Never did these deviations result in a literary whiplash; they always enhanced my experience as a reader.
Overall, this book is masterful and I now look upon it, as well as Frank himself, with fondness. Frank Ramsey should be in the cultural zeitgeist, and if this is ever achieved, this book will be the cornerstone upon which that edifice is built.
A note to prospective readers: Cheryl Misak is herself a philosopher, and thus enjoys a comfort with much of Ramsey's writing only few of us could ever dream of achieving. As such, some of her writing, which deconstructs Ramsey's ideas, is highly technical and can be quite opaque a layperson. I would encourage those debating getting into this book to not worry. There will be unexpected pearls one may not think accessible hidden within the highly technical discussion. In addition, the rest of the book is of such high quality that it would be a crime to have missed it based upon this apprehension alone.
(http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-d...)
One of the chief pleasures I take in good biographies is getting to encounter an individual, regarded as titanic, on a human level. In this way, Walter Isaacson has done society a great service. I consider him to be our best biographer (while second place is not even close) mostly because he is able to translate greatness onto the page without valorizing the individual to such an extent that we lose who they were as a person. What is more, he is able to do this without being an expert within the field that his subject is from (e.g. he is not a physicist and yet has certainly given us Einstein's best biography).
Misak achieves this perfectly, but does so accomplishing something most biographers are never forced to do: she had to demonstrate Ramsey's greatness. Frank Ramsey is a cultural non-entity who is appreciated only within the boundaries of the fields that he so profoundly affected. We have no comprehensive account of his achievements, and as such, society as a whole has not appreciated what he meant to its history. This book makes the case for his greatness (based on how he revolutionized not one, but three fields), all while making the case for how devastatingly human he was. We get to see how powerful Ramsey's mind was, but also the easy grace with which he achieved his breakthroughs. What is more, Misak relays just how admirable he was as a human being. I would want to spend time with Ramsey which is often not the case with our heroes and titans.
Here is an excerpt from an article by Michael Bevan at the Oxonian Review (link at the end of this review) that is so well put it deserves to be shared in its original form:
"The backside of over-valorising the subject in biography is that ordinary human beings are suddenly seen as incapable of inheriting their legacy. (This is just a consequence of the fact that to make the past into an age of heroes is almost unavoidably to make the present into an age of decay). To the extent that Misak has avoided this, by avoiding such valorisation, she has been able, besides offering a detailed and compelling account of Ramsey’s life, to make us feel as if we are of the same species as Ramsey—even if his contemporaries were occasionally less than sure. The possibility is then left open that mere humans might yet be capable of following him and, importantly, without needing to posture as an eccentric, a character, or anything like that. He did not need to be unearthly to be great and, therefore, neither do we."
Beyond Misak's general approach, the construction and execution of her writing from page to page is exquisite. While the overall progression of the book is chronological, she has the dexterity and sophistication to be able to deviate from this approach to discuss a topic in more depth, or explore a related idea that enhances her original point. This sometimes involved jumping forwards or backwards in time. At multiple junctures, this involved the use of "guest boxes" where experts in the field in question could explore Ramsey's ideas, often in highly technical terms that will only be familiar to those in that particular field. Never did these deviations result in a literary whiplash; they always enhanced my experience as a reader.
Overall, this book is masterful and I now look upon it, as well as Frank himself, with fondness. Frank Ramsey should be in the cultural zeitgeist, and if this is ever achieved, this book will be the cornerstone upon which that edifice is built.
A note to prospective readers: Cheryl Misak is herself a philosopher, and thus enjoys a comfort with much of Ramsey's writing only few of us could ever dream of achieving. As such, some of her writing, which deconstructs Ramsey's ideas, is highly technical and can be quite opaque a layperson. I would encourage those debating getting into this book to not worry. There will be unexpected pearls one may not think accessible hidden within the highly technical discussion. In addition, the rest of the book is of such high quality that it would be a crime to have missed it based upon this apprehension alone.
(http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-d...)
March 8, 2022
Ramsey on Wittgenstein: "some of his sentences are intentionally ambiguous, having an ordinary meaning and a more difficult meaning that he also believes".
Geoff Pyke was a friend of Ramsey and an interesting character himself. During the war he invented screw tanks to transport soldiers in the snow, and a material called pykrete - a mix of ice and sawdust - for building floating aircraft carriers. He eventually committed suicide which Time magazine described as "the only unoriginal thing he'd ever done". Some other facts from Wikipedia:
- He persuaded the Daily Chronicle to send him to Germany in WWI as a war correspondent. He was shortly arrested and put in solitary confinement.
- He wrote: "Hunger – real hunger ... can have disastrous effects on a man's mind. It has been known to make men think very seriously about the rights of property, and a few have become so unbalanced as to become socialists"
- He recreated poems like If and Jabberwocky from memory.
- When transferred to another prison, he convinced another Oxford lad to escape with him by compiling escape statistics. He prepared for escape with a program of callisthenics.
- He became the Englishman to get into Germany and out again and wrote about his experiences in a book To Ruhleben – And Back.
- Pyke then figured out a way to make money with commodities and used it to found an innovative school for his son based on the ideas of John Dewey.
- After he ran out of luck in the commodoties market and went bankrupt, he started fighting German anti-sematism and organising voluntary manufacturing aid for the Spanish civil war (plus invented a motorcycle sidecar for delivering medical supplies).
- Before the outbreak of the war, Pyke unsuccessfully tried to conduct a secret opinion poll in Germany by sending pollsters disguised as a touring golf club.
- During the war he also devised schemes for getting soldiers from ships onto land via pipes with running water and air tubes, and after the war he figured out an economical way to power trains with sugar-powered cyclist, as there was a shortage of coal and oil and lots of sugar lying around.
I have little idea what this means, but it's a very funny string of words.
A friend of Ramsey said: "Frank would stand up to god himself if he thought god got something wrong."
"All Frank knew of applied mathematics were Newton's three laws of motion, and when he had to work out an applied problem, he did so by working it out from those first principles."
Wittgenstein made a woman burst in to tears when she said that a tree was beautiful and he insisted "what do you mean?"
A nice bit of common sense philosophy from Ramsey:
Geoff Pyke was a friend of Ramsey and an interesting character himself. During the war he invented screw tanks to transport soldiers in the snow, and a material called pykrete - a mix of ice and sawdust - for building floating aircraft carriers. He eventually committed suicide which Time magazine described as "the only unoriginal thing he'd ever done". Some other facts from Wikipedia:
- He persuaded the Daily Chronicle to send him to Germany in WWI as a war correspondent. He was shortly arrested and put in solitary confinement.
- He wrote: "Hunger – real hunger ... can have disastrous effects on a man's mind. It has been known to make men think very seriously about the rights of property, and a few have become so unbalanced as to become socialists"
- He recreated poems like If and Jabberwocky from memory.
- When transferred to another prison, he convinced another Oxford lad to escape with him by compiling escape statistics. He prepared for escape with a program of callisthenics.
- He became the Englishman to get into Germany and out again and wrote about his experiences in a book To Ruhleben – And Back.
- Pyke then figured out a way to make money with commodities and used it to found an innovative school for his son based on the ideas of John Dewey.
- After he ran out of luck in the commodoties market and went bankrupt, he started fighting German anti-sematism and organising voluntary manufacturing aid for the Spanish civil war (plus invented a motorcycle sidecar for delivering medical supplies).
- Before the outbreak of the war, Pyke unsuccessfully tried to conduct a secret opinion poll in Germany by sending pollsters disguised as a touring golf club.
- During the war he also devised schemes for getting soldiers from ships onto land via pipes with running water and air tubes, and after the war he figured out an economical way to power trains with sugar-powered cyclist, as there was a shortage of coal and oil and lots of sugar lying around.
[Lionel Penrose] suggested that chess might be 1) a homosexual activity, 2) a sadistic activity, 3) a masachistic activity and castration complex, 4) an anal erotic activity, 5) another sexual satisfaction given by chess play, 6) chess as oral activity, 7) a chess problem as dream of family conflict
I have little idea what this means, but it's a very funny string of words.
A friend of Ramsey said: "Frank would stand up to god himself if he thought god got something wrong."
"All Frank knew of applied mathematics were Newton's three laws of motion, and when he had to work out an applied problem, he did so by working it out from those first principles."
Wittgenstein made a woman burst in to tears when she said that a tree was beautiful and he insisted "what do you mean?"
A nice bit of common sense philosophy from Ramsey:
In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn't. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me and depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one's activities.
April 12, 2020
Frank Ramsey is an overlooked figure in philosophy/mathematics/economics and academia in general. Some of that is due to his tragically early death at age 26. But the fact remains that he produced many fundamental and novel ideas that would form the basis of economics, mathematics (Ramsey Theory), and philosophy.
I came at this biography most interested in his contributions in mathematics and philosophy. Ramsey Theory is a really cool field which is related to graph theory, combinatorics, decision theory, decidability, and Gödelian logic. The mathematical questions it deals with are fascinating in their own right, but in addition the ideas find topspin in philosophy, giving it a "life" that - in my opinion - few mathematical fields attain.
The story behind it is no less interesting, and Misak takes us through the awe-inspiring last decade of Ramsey's life, in which he produced many exciting works, including his work toward the Entscheidungsproblem eventually giving way to Ramsey Theory.
Some parts of the book interested me more than others. Many of the purely biographical aspects of the book weren't for me, though I must admit learning about the culture of Cambridge in the 1920s, (E.g. the sexual mores of the Bloomsbury group and how it sounded like a proto-sixties movement) as well as the truly dizzying academic roster that backdropped Ramsey's life, did have their interesting moments.
Actually, an aside, here's some of the names that come up in this book, like, it's actually insane how many famous people were closely connected to Ramsey's life:
Wilhelm Ackermann
Paul Erdos (though tbf Erdos touched everything)
Gottlob Frege
Sigmund Freud (his philosophy was very much in Vogue in the 1920s, and a student of his was Ramsey's therapist)
Kurt Gödel (another member of the Vienna Circle and some thought that Ramsey would have proved Incompleteness first had he lived)
Thomas Hardy
David Hilbert (posed Entscheidungsproblem)
Janina Hosiasson (Raven Paradox)
William James (Ramsey corrects his interpretation of pragmatism)
John Maynard Keynes (worked closely with Ramsey)
Stephen Kleene
Andrey Kolmogorov
G.E. Moore
John Forbes Nash
Giuseppe Peano
C.S. Pierce (Ramsey significantly builds on top of Pierce's ideas)
Lionel Penrose
Joseph Stiglitz
B.L. Van der Waerden
John Venn
Ludwig Wittgenstein (they heavily influenced each other and had many discussions)
Virginia Woolf
All these people are names I heard before and their names just kept coming up! And this doesn't even include the major forebears to Ramsey, whose names come up often (e.g. Bayes, Hume, etc...) though I feel including the more distant connections of those would be cheating, as they say more about them than Ramsey.
Anyway... I digress.
For me the book had patches of brilliance and got me thinking about these ideas in new ways, but was unfortunately - for me - preoccupied with personal accounts. I obviously can't fault the author for that since this is a biography, but they just pale in comparison to Ramsey's philosophy and mathematics, which I could read about for hours.
I suppose I could dive headlong into the academics for more of what I was looking for, but there's precious little (that I've been able to find) that weigh Ramsey's ideas in its proper philosophical context.
If there were something like Torkel Franzen's "Inexhaustibility" (which does an excellent job explaining Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and still maintaining its philosophy and answering questions about its logical weight) but for Ramsey's works, I would eat it up.
But I should judge this book for what it is. A well-written biography of an overlooked figure that really shines when it comes to the subject's ideas.
I came at this biography most interested in his contributions in mathematics and philosophy. Ramsey Theory is a really cool field which is related to graph theory, combinatorics, decision theory, decidability, and Gödelian logic. The mathematical questions it deals with are fascinating in their own right, but in addition the ideas find topspin in philosophy, giving it a "life" that - in my opinion - few mathematical fields attain.
The story behind it is no less interesting, and Misak takes us through the awe-inspiring last decade of Ramsey's life, in which he produced many exciting works, including his work toward the Entscheidungsproblem eventually giving way to Ramsey Theory.
Some parts of the book interested me more than others. Many of the purely biographical aspects of the book weren't for me, though I must admit learning about the culture of Cambridge in the 1920s, (E.g. the sexual mores of the Bloomsbury group and how it sounded like a proto-sixties movement) as well as the truly dizzying academic roster that backdropped Ramsey's life, did have their interesting moments.
Actually, an aside, here's some of the names that come up in this book, like, it's actually insane how many famous people were closely connected to Ramsey's life:
Wilhelm Ackermann
Paul Erdos (though tbf Erdos touched everything)
Gottlob Frege
Sigmund Freud (his philosophy was very much in Vogue in the 1920s, and a student of his was Ramsey's therapist)
Kurt Gödel (another member of the Vienna Circle and some thought that Ramsey would have proved Incompleteness first had he lived)
Thomas Hardy
David Hilbert (posed Entscheidungsproblem)
Janina Hosiasson (Raven Paradox)
William James (Ramsey corrects his interpretation of pragmatism)
John Maynard Keynes (worked closely with Ramsey)
Stephen Kleene
Andrey Kolmogorov
G.E. Moore
John Forbes Nash
Giuseppe Peano
C.S. Pierce (Ramsey significantly builds on top of Pierce's ideas)
Lionel Penrose
Joseph Stiglitz
B.L. Van der Waerden
John Venn
Ludwig Wittgenstein (they heavily influenced each other and had many discussions)
Virginia Woolf
All these people are names I heard before and their names just kept coming up! And this doesn't even include the major forebears to Ramsey, whose names come up often (e.g. Bayes, Hume, etc...) though I feel including the more distant connections of those would be cheating, as they say more about them than Ramsey.
Anyway... I digress.
For me the book had patches of brilliance and got me thinking about these ideas in new ways, but was unfortunately - for me - preoccupied with personal accounts. I obviously can't fault the author for that since this is a biography, but they just pale in comparison to Ramsey's philosophy and mathematics, which I could read about for hours.
I suppose I could dive headlong into the academics for more of what I was looking for, but there's precious little (that I've been able to find) that weigh Ramsey's ideas in its proper philosophical context.
If there were something like Torkel Franzen's "Inexhaustibility" (which does an excellent job explaining Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and still maintaining its philosophy and answering questions about its logical weight) but for Ramsey's works, I would eat it up.
But I should judge this book for what it is. A well-written biography of an overlooked figure that really shines when it comes to the subject's ideas.
June 9, 2020
Ramsey was a genius,but not in probability.
Ramsey made some very valuable contributions to a number of fields, but not to decision science, probability ,or statistics .The title of his uncompleted essay that was published in 1931, "Truth and Probabiity",is an oxymoron,because probability can never deal with ,or be about ,truth. There is no connection between probability and truth.There is no such thing as a true probability.
Ramsey was not the first to figure out how to define probability subjectively using a betting set up approach. Emile Borel was. Ramsey never demolished Keynes's Theory of Probability in his undergraduate days or in "Truth and Probability",because Ramsey had absolutely no idea that Keynes's theory in his 1921 A Treatise on Probability was an interval valued theory of probability built on G. Boole's 1854 logical theory of probability that was presented in 1854 in the Laws of Thought. Keynes used non additive, imprecise and indeterminate approximation and inexact measurement to measure probability,as opposed to Ramsey's exact measurement and precise ,additive ,approach to probability ,to deal with both risk and uncertainty. Ramsey's work in probability, decision science, and statistics can't deal with uncertainty because of his additivity assumption. Only Keynes's theory ,based on Boole's theory, can deal with both risk (additive probability) and uncertainty(non additive probability).
Bertrand Russell made a final assessment of Keynes's theory of probability in 1959 in his My Philosophical Development.Russell's final assessment was that Keynes's contribution was the best that currently existed,although it could be improved. Nowhere in Russell's final book are any of Ramsey's criticisms mentioned. Russell's final assessment of Ramsey's contributions to probability, statistics ,and decision theory was that these contributions have the LEAST value ,when compared to all of his other contributions.
The reasons why Ramsey overlooked Keynes's interval valued approach to probability, in both his 1922 review in Cambridge Magazine and in 1926 in "Truth and Probability" ,was his confusion over the meaning of the term used by Keynes in chapter 3 of the A Treatise on Probability(TP) ,"non numerical " probability .Keynes gives a precise definition in Part II of the TP on p.163 of the TP-his 'non numerical probabilities' are identical to George Boole's constituent probabilities .Unfortunately, just like Emile Borel, Ramsey skipped Part II of the A Treatise on Probability. Ramsey never grasped that Keynes's probabilities are interval valued probabilities with a lower and upper bound.Skipping Part II of Keynes's magnum opus follows directly from the introduction written to the 1973 edition of the A Treatise on Probability in the Collected Writings of JMK by Richard Braithwaite.
The book ,overall, is very good.It establishes that in a number of other areas Ramsey did make path breaking breakthroughs that have served as the foundations for other scholars contributions.Ramsey's interactions with Wittgenstein are presented to the reader in a clear and comprehensive fashion.
Ramsey made some very valuable contributions to a number of fields, but not to decision science, probability ,or statistics .The title of his uncompleted essay that was published in 1931, "Truth and Probabiity",is an oxymoron,because probability can never deal with ,or be about ,truth. There is no connection between probability and truth.There is no such thing as a true probability.
Ramsey was not the first to figure out how to define probability subjectively using a betting set up approach. Emile Borel was. Ramsey never demolished Keynes's Theory of Probability in his undergraduate days or in "Truth and Probability",because Ramsey had absolutely no idea that Keynes's theory in his 1921 A Treatise on Probability was an interval valued theory of probability built on G. Boole's 1854 logical theory of probability that was presented in 1854 in the Laws of Thought. Keynes used non additive, imprecise and indeterminate approximation and inexact measurement to measure probability,as opposed to Ramsey's exact measurement and precise ,additive ,approach to probability ,to deal with both risk and uncertainty. Ramsey's work in probability, decision science, and statistics can't deal with uncertainty because of his additivity assumption. Only Keynes's theory ,based on Boole's theory, can deal with both risk (additive probability) and uncertainty(non additive probability).
Bertrand Russell made a final assessment of Keynes's theory of probability in 1959 in his My Philosophical Development.Russell's final assessment was that Keynes's contribution was the best that currently existed,although it could be improved. Nowhere in Russell's final book are any of Ramsey's criticisms mentioned. Russell's final assessment of Ramsey's contributions to probability, statistics ,and decision theory was that these contributions have the LEAST value ,when compared to all of his other contributions.
The reasons why Ramsey overlooked Keynes's interval valued approach to probability, in both his 1922 review in Cambridge Magazine and in 1926 in "Truth and Probability" ,was his confusion over the meaning of the term used by Keynes in chapter 3 of the A Treatise on Probability(TP) ,"non numerical " probability .Keynes gives a precise definition in Part II of the TP on p.163 of the TP-his 'non numerical probabilities' are identical to George Boole's constituent probabilities .Unfortunately, just like Emile Borel, Ramsey skipped Part II of the A Treatise on Probability. Ramsey never grasped that Keynes's probabilities are interval valued probabilities with a lower and upper bound.Skipping Part II of Keynes's magnum opus follows directly from the introduction written to the 1973 edition of the A Treatise on Probability in the Collected Writings of JMK by Richard Braithwaite.
The book ,overall, is very good.It establishes that in a number of other areas Ramsey did make path breaking breakthroughs that have served as the foundations for other scholars contributions.Ramsey's interactions with Wittgenstein are presented to the reader in a clear and comprehensive fashion.
November 1, 2025
really awesome biography. One thing Misak does that I would love to see other intellectual biographers do is that she enlists ~20 academics from varying disciplines across the world to provide brief blurbs on whatever it is that Ramsey is talking about. These blurbs also function as kind of in-text footnotes, in that you can skip them without missing any biographical information--as I learned to do with all the math ones :P
I think the only way to appreciate just how prolific and profound Ramsey was is to study some topic that he invented as an aside, which I was able to do from a class I took last semester (viz. "Bayesian Epistemology," a subfield of formal epistemology that owes its existence to you-know-who). In a paper called "Truth and Probability," which was only cobbled together from his notes and published after his death, he provides this paragraph:
Note the last clause here: Ramsey says that if we represent degrees of belief that obey the laws of probability as an agent's proclivity to make and decline certain bets (itself a novel and ingenuitive idea), then it seems that one condition of (rational) consistency is that there could not be some series of bets that would each be accepted if offered individually, but would guarantee a loss for the bettor. This kind of "book" is called a "Dutch Book" and has spawned essentially an entire subfield at the intersection between philosophy and mathematics.
Many take susceptibility to a "Dutch Book" to be sufficient for irrationality, but what about a "Dutch Strategy," where the agent is willing to take a series of collectively disadvantageous bets over time? Many rational constrants have been suggested on the grounds that violating them would make one vulnerable to a Dutch Strategy; for example, Bas von Frassen proposed the "Reflection Principle," which states that an agent's credence (i.e. degree of belief) in some proposition at t(1) should be equal to their expected future credence at t(2), on the grounds that violating it will suggest an agent ought to take bets now about future events that they themselves would expect to decline if offered in the future. Enough of these constraints have been offered that I'm personally skeptical that we should imagine all of them are required to be rational.
Given that the Dutch Book merited only a single sentence in a forty-page paper, it seems that Ramsey didn't think it was such an ingenious idea; it's hard not to think about what else he thought up that he didn't bother to write down--much less everything that would have been published had he not died when he was 26 years old.
I think the only way to appreciate just how prolific and profound Ramsey was is to study some topic that he invented as an aside, which I was able to do from a class I took last semester (viz. "Bayesian Epistemology," a subfield of formal epistemology that owes its existence to you-know-who). In a paper called "Truth and Probability," which was only cobbled together from his notes and published after his death, he provides this paragraph:
Having any definite degree of belief implies a certain measure of consistency, namely willingness to bet on a given proposition at the same odds for any stake, the stakes being measured in terms of ultimate values. Having degrees of belief obeying the laws of probability implies a further measure of consistency, namely such a consistency between the odds acceptable on different propositions as shall prevent a book being made against you.
Note the last clause here: Ramsey says that if we represent degrees of belief that obey the laws of probability as an agent's proclivity to make and decline certain bets (itself a novel and ingenuitive idea), then it seems that one condition of (rational) consistency is that there could not be some series of bets that would each be accepted if offered individually, but would guarantee a loss for the bettor. This kind of "book" is called a "Dutch Book" and has spawned essentially an entire subfield at the intersection between philosophy and mathematics.
Many take susceptibility to a "Dutch Book" to be sufficient for irrationality, but what about a "Dutch Strategy," where the agent is willing to take a series of collectively disadvantageous bets over time? Many rational constrants have been suggested on the grounds that violating them would make one vulnerable to a Dutch Strategy; for example, Bas von Frassen proposed the "Reflection Principle," which states that an agent's credence (i.e. degree of belief) in some proposition at t(1) should be equal to their expected future credence at t(2), on the grounds that violating it will suggest an agent ought to take bets now about future events that they themselves would expect to decline if offered in the future. Enough of these constraints have been offered that I'm personally skeptical that we should imagine all of them are required to be rational.
Given that the Dutch Book merited only a single sentence in a forty-page paper, it seems that Ramsey didn't think it was such an ingenious idea; it's hard not to think about what else he thought up that he didn't bother to write down--much less everything that would have been published had he not died when he was 26 years old.
August 28, 2020
Before I read this book, I was only slightly familiar with Frank Ramsey. The reason why I choose to read this book is due to a review that I read which sparked my interest.* There is another one I can recommend.**
The title of this review could be the philosopher's philosopher, but this would not be fair and would not accurately reflect the work and thought of Frank Plumpton Ramsey. In this respect, Misak writes that 'The border country was indeed Ramsey's territory. He roamed freely over philosophy, mathematics, logic, probability theory, and economics. Perhaps no one would ever again do so with such intelligence and skill' (p. 112). This characterization describes Ramsey perfectly, and Misak provides an extensive account of Ramsey's intellectual abilities throughout the book.
Misak understands to blend Ramsey's biography with contextual knowledge of the history of thought, which is made lively through the encounters Ramsey made throughout his rich intellectual life. For those interested in the history of ideas or history of philosophical thought that, of course, will be of great interest. Still, Ramsey occupies center stage in this book. Misak takes the reader to the intellectual environment of the 1920s, focusing on Ramsey's relationships and his intellectual exchange with others of his lifetime. The time and place of the 1920s that I found so fascinating. In this respect, how Ramsey evolved intellectually, shaping the ideas of his contemporaries and vice versa. For Ramsey, Cambridge was his intellectual center. But he spent some time in Vienna and was in touch with thinkers of the so-called Vienna circle.
I am thankful that Cheryl Misak undertook this tremendous effort to honor Frank Ramsey with a biography, also with the ambition to illustrate the lasting legacy of Ramsey's life and work. Misak, without doubt, has spent a great deal of time in archives, with the use of many sources, namely the correspondence between Ramsey and his contemporaries. Lastly, in my opinion, the book deserves 4.5 stars.
*Diane Coyle's book review:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
** See also Anthony Gottlieb's review "The Man Who Thought Too Fast":
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
The title of this review could be the philosopher's philosopher, but this would not be fair and would not accurately reflect the work and thought of Frank Plumpton Ramsey. In this respect, Misak writes that 'The border country was indeed Ramsey's territory. He roamed freely over philosophy, mathematics, logic, probability theory, and economics. Perhaps no one would ever again do so with such intelligence and skill' (p. 112). This characterization describes Ramsey perfectly, and Misak provides an extensive account of Ramsey's intellectual abilities throughout the book.
Misak understands to blend Ramsey's biography with contextual knowledge of the history of thought, which is made lively through the encounters Ramsey made throughout his rich intellectual life. For those interested in the history of ideas or history of philosophical thought that, of course, will be of great interest. Still, Ramsey occupies center stage in this book. Misak takes the reader to the intellectual environment of the 1920s, focusing on Ramsey's relationships and his intellectual exchange with others of his lifetime. The time and place of the 1920s that I found so fascinating. In this respect, how Ramsey evolved intellectually, shaping the ideas of his contemporaries and vice versa. For Ramsey, Cambridge was his intellectual center. But he spent some time in Vienna and was in touch with thinkers of the so-called Vienna circle.
I am thankful that Cheryl Misak undertook this tremendous effort to honor Frank Ramsey with a biography, also with the ambition to illustrate the lasting legacy of Ramsey's life and work. Misak, without doubt, has spent a great deal of time in archives, with the use of many sources, namely the correspondence between Ramsey and his contemporaries. Lastly, in my opinion, the book deserves 4.5 stars.
*Diane Coyle's book review:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
** See also Anthony Gottlieb's review "The Man Who Thought Too Fast":
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
April 29, 2023
Detailed and engaging life of Frank Ramsey, the prodigy who made major contributions to maths, economics and philosophy before dying aged 26. The philosopher Donald Davidson spoke of a "Ramsey effect", where you come up with a great new idea only to discover that Ramsey got there first. The author is a philosophy professor and she includes interludes where various experts go into more depth about a specific contribution of Ramsey's to their field.
Ramsey was born into an elite family and sent to an elite public school (Winchester), which was just as horrible as you'd imagine, especially for someone with brains. He finished early and went to Cambridge's Trinity College, where he was already seen as a fearsome talent. He made connections with G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein; he was mentored and championed by C.K. Ogden, a pacifist publisher and public intellectual who seems to have taken advantage of him somewhat. Afterwards John Maynard Keynes took over, bringing him to King's College where economics had dominated since the time of Alfred Marshall. As a result of this he wrote two economics papers which are still apparently considered classics, about optimal taxation and the optimal saving rate. In philosophy he criticised Keynes' Treatise on Probability (which argued that one's subjective probability is an assessment of an exact, unknown probability) with an early form of subjectivism. He also argued against Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which he had translated, ultimately leading Wittgenstein to change his mind and write the Philosophical Investigations (the "late Wittgenstein").
Wittgenstein seems to have been a really, really awful person, especially when compared with the amiable and kind Ramsey. He was apparently the "sunniest" of his five siblings - a low bar as three of them killed themselves. He claimed that Ramsey's criticisms were superficial and then, when he changed his mind to accommodate them, accused him of plagiarism. He constantly berated people who were trying to help him, and was haughty, rude, hypersensitive to insults and hypercritical. After Ramsey's early death he wrote a letter to his grieving father accusing him of bungling his son's medical care. While he got on with Ramsey's wife Lettuce*, he later cut ties with her after he left some possessions in her care while he was in between lodgings, which included a mouldy bathmat, which she threw out.
Ramsey by contrast would go out of his way not to offend anyone. His moral views were egalitarian and pragmatic: when addressing the Apostles on free love he considered whether this might harm women, especially in the poorer classes. (He also considered the group quite childish and out of touch, despite its elite reputation; letting women join, which happened later, might have improved things.) He was a socialist who didn't buy Marxism, and interested in psychoanalysis without literally believing Freud. He underwent psychoanalysis in Vienna which seems to have done him a lot of good. Soon after he met and married Lettuce. The two cautiously agreed to have an open marriage. He took a lover, but when she followed suit he wrote her an angry and jealous letter accusing her of being carried away by lust. He was friends with the Bloomsbury crowd but wasn't witty and sophisticated enough to fit in properly.
Ramsey didn't like his teaching obligations, but got along with it as there was no choice. Good students loved him, while weaker ones complained that he just couldn't imagine how someone couldn't find his ideas obvious. A lot of his papers similarly skipped over proofs for things that were obvious to him but needed laborious verification by later scholars. In addition to his contributions in maths and mathematical economics, he is probably best known today as a philosopher. He took in Wittgenstein and Russell as well as the American pragmatist Peirce to form a model of truth based on what a sentence leads to. While William James claimed that truth is what is useful to us, Ramsey promoted the less radical claim that a sentence's meaning is defined by the actions it would lead to. If we plan to meet at Nelson's Column, we might not actually end up meeting there, but it is in general a communication which will lead to this outcome. (This idea is known as "success semantics".)
Finally a great bit about an experimental school, which wasn't that relevant to the book but is just very entertaining:
Ramsey was born into an elite family and sent to an elite public school (Winchester), which was just as horrible as you'd imagine, especially for someone with brains. He finished early and went to Cambridge's Trinity College, where he was already seen as a fearsome talent. He made connections with G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein; he was mentored and championed by C.K. Ogden, a pacifist publisher and public intellectual who seems to have taken advantage of him somewhat. Afterwards John Maynard Keynes took over, bringing him to King's College where economics had dominated since the time of Alfred Marshall. As a result of this he wrote two economics papers which are still apparently considered classics, about optimal taxation and the optimal saving rate. In philosophy he criticised Keynes' Treatise on Probability (which argued that one's subjective probability is an assessment of an exact, unknown probability) with an early form of subjectivism. He also argued against Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which he had translated, ultimately leading Wittgenstein to change his mind and write the Philosophical Investigations (the "late Wittgenstein").
Wittgenstein seems to have been a really, really awful person, especially when compared with the amiable and kind Ramsey. He was apparently the "sunniest" of his five siblings - a low bar as three of them killed themselves. He claimed that Ramsey's criticisms were superficial and then, when he changed his mind to accommodate them, accused him of plagiarism. He constantly berated people who were trying to help him, and was haughty, rude, hypersensitive to insults and hypercritical. After Ramsey's early death he wrote a letter to his grieving father accusing him of bungling his son's medical care. While he got on with Ramsey's wife Lettuce*, he later cut ties with her after he left some possessions in her care while he was in between lodgings, which included a mouldy bathmat, which she threw out.
Ramsey by contrast would go out of his way not to offend anyone. His moral views were egalitarian and pragmatic: when addressing the Apostles on free love he considered whether this might harm women, especially in the poorer classes. (He also considered the group quite childish and out of touch, despite its elite reputation; letting women join, which happened later, might have improved things.) He was a socialist who didn't buy Marxism, and interested in psychoanalysis without literally believing Freud. He underwent psychoanalysis in Vienna which seems to have done him a lot of good. Soon after he met and married Lettuce. The two cautiously agreed to have an open marriage. He took a lover, but when she followed suit he wrote her an angry and jealous letter accusing her of being carried away by lust. He was friends with the Bloomsbury crowd but wasn't witty and sophisticated enough to fit in properly.
Ramsey didn't like his teaching obligations, but got along with it as there was no choice. Good students loved him, while weaker ones complained that he just couldn't imagine how someone couldn't find his ideas obvious. A lot of his papers similarly skipped over proofs for things that were obvious to him but needed laborious verification by later scholars. In addition to his contributions in maths and mathematical economics, he is probably best known today as a philosopher. He took in Wittgenstein and Russell as well as the American pragmatist Peirce to form a model of truth based on what a sentence leads to. While William James claimed that truth is what is useful to us, Ramsey promoted the less radical claim that a sentence's meaning is defined by the actions it would lead to. If we plan to meet at Nelson's Column, we might not actually end up meeting there, but it is in general a communication which will lead to this outcome. (This idea is known as "success semantics".)
Finally a great bit about an experimental school, which wasn't that relevant to the book but is just very entertaining:
The school’s ideology had the children considered as 'plants', to be left in their natural state, and the teachers mere 'observers'. There were many bright pupils, but there was a disproportionate number of difficult, disruptive ones who did not fit into any other establishment. Unsurprisingly, the result resembled a state of nature…There was also rather a lot of spitting, including in Susan Isaacs' face, and experimentation with faeces and what non-Freudians might call private body parts. One story, perhaps hyperbolic, circulated widely: the school was so permissive that when one boy didn’t feel like getting out of the taxi at the school gates, he was allowed to remain in the vehicle, driven round Cambridge all day with a whopping bill delivered to his parents. It was said that the children organized a deputation to ask the staff: 'How can we make you make us do what we don’t want to do?'* This is a simply wonderful name, and as I listened to this as an audiobook I shall overlook the fact that she spelled it "Lettice".
Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews