Comments on: Conspicuous by his Absence

By: Crooked Timber » » The Frontier is not Out There

Crooked Timber » » The Frontier is not Out There — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 16:43:35 +0000

[...] ond) than any human-piloted missions. The second argument draws on a famous quotation from Frank Ramsey about the relative importance of the cosmos and humanity: [...]

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Fri, 07 May 2004 05:48:17 +0000

Zizka: If you’re interested in trying Sraffa again, “The Production of Commodities: An Introduction to Sraffa” by J. E. Woods, Humanities Press International, 1990. It only requires algebra and takes you through the rough outlines. I bought my copy used at Powell’s in Chicago about 10 years ago, so I’ve no idea whether it’s still in print. The point and deeper implications of Sraffa, though, are difficult. His work was intended to confute neo-classical economics, but doesn’t seem to offer a clear alternative.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Fri, 07 May 2004 05:20:23 +0000

Thanks, John C. Hopefully more later from someone. I tried to read Sraffa’s book and it was pretty straightforward sentence by sentence but the point was unclear to me. That sounds like how Wittgenstein is to a lot of people, though there’s enough help out there now to make W easier.

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Thu, 06 May 2004 12:26:22 +0000

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was an economist as well as a mathematician and philosopher? It took me a while to confirm my suspicions that this guy writing about philosophy might in fact have been the inventor of Ramsey theory, but I never turned up anything in other areas of academic study. I think a reasonable question might be whether Ramsey’s contributions to math or philosophy were greater. I don’t know much about his philosophical work, but in mathematics, it seems that he just posed some of the basic problems of Ramsey theory, and proved the first infinite case of Ramsey’s theorem. However, all sorts of unexpected generalizations of Ramsey’s theorem have become quite important in mathematical logic and combinatorics, not to mention their implications in areas like topology and algebra. At any rate, the idea that order can arise just because something’s big enough is fascinating to anyone.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 05 May 2004 22:24:00 +0000

Zizka: Sraffa was a close personal friend of Antonio Gramsci- (I think they attended the University of Turin together)- and led the international campaign to secure his release from prison. He was a socialist and a pacifist, but there is no evidence that he himself was a committed Marxist, as opposed to associating with Marxists, (such as his collaborator Maurice Dobbs). His economic work, highly condensed and abstract, is a neo-Ricardan account intended as preliminary to a criticism of the neo-classical marginalist turn in economics. I’ve never heard of Joan Robinson being referred to as a Marxist, at all, though she maintained relations with the Polish Marxist economist Michael Kalecki. Her tendency is usually referred to as “post-Keynesian”. I’ve wondered about Sraffa myself and thought that, in his obscure, quiet way, he must have been an extraordinarily lucid and brilliant thinker. Reading the Monk biography of Wittgenstein and skimming a couple of others, it was clear that his biographers simply hadn’t bothered to read Sraffa’s own work. One thing he clearly gave Wittgenstein, with whom he met weekly for 15 years, and, who credited him with sparking the transformation of his thought, was his constructive method in economics, whereby he starts with a simplest case, too primitive to be at all realistic, and then adds on layers one at a time, until a model is formed that can be realistically illuminating. This is clearly reflected in W.’s language game method of doing philosophical analysis. The other thing that W. explicitly credited Sraffa with in influencing his later thinking was the “anthropologizing” turn. There’s no paper trail, so academically it is never mentioned, but there is some suggestion here of an unwitting influence of Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis” on W.’s later thought, via Sraffa, who clearly knew Gramsci’s thinking, since he helped to smuggle out and edit the “Prison Notebooks”. A comparison of Gramsci on “common sense” and Wittgenstein on natural language might prove instructive.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Wed, 05 May 2004 15:51:03 +0000

I’m curious about where Sraffa stands in the economists’ pantheon. He seems incredibly interesting and Joan Robinson spoke very highly of him. As far as that goes, where does Joan Robinson stand? Both are usually called Marxists based on what seems to be very slender evidence. (I am aware of Robinson’s political activities, but just haven’t seen Marxism in anything she wrote, and as I recall Marxist groups rejected her economic thinking). Based on what I’ve read of Robinson, the question probably is whether they actually were refuted or just ignored. Perhaps a CT person could make this a project?

By: jholbo

jholbo — Wed, 05 May 2004 02:37:09 +0000

As a philosopher who wrote his dissertation on Wittgenstein – mostly on the Tractatus – I heartily concur with Kieran’s judgment that Ramsey could have exerted a salutary counter-gravitational influence, perhaps allowing many smart people who because rather hopelessly afflicted with Wittgensteinian mannerisms (and it is all downhill from there) to maintain their equilibrium.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 04 May 2004 15:36:44 +0000

Whoever it is, its a very odd picture. What I liked on the page was this list of alumni: Charles Kingsley Charles Stuart Parnell Archbishop Michael Ramsey Thomas Hardy TS Eliot George Mallory Samuel Pepys Rudyard Kipling CS Lewis I don’t think that even fans of Michael R would deny that he is the odd one out in the list.

By: David

David — Tue, 04 May 2004 15:30:03 +0000

Well, even Magdalene College’s Development Office cannot quite distinguish between Frank Ramsey and his brother Michael. See this webpage about Michael Ramsey. Look in the upper right corner at the photo of “Michael”: http://www.magdalenecambridge.com/biog/ramsey.html Now compare that photo with the one on the upper left of the following webpage about Frank Ramsey: http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/RamseyLect.html ;)

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Tue, 04 May 2004 14:32:19 +0000

Here’s my paean to Ramsey, from a little over a year ago: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_stuartbuck_archive.html#93314001

By: harry

harry — Tue, 04 May 2004 14:19:02 +0000

His brother, Michael, was an Archbishop of Canterbury Wow—the things you learn on this site. Not, it has to be said, a very good Archbishop of Canterbury, but he has suddenly become a great deal more interesting to me, at least.

By: NIcholas Weininger

NIcholas Weininger — Tue, 04 May 2004 14:17:07 +0000

My exposure to Ramsey theory as a sophomore convinced me to pursue a major in mathematics. I still think it one of the greatest pearls of the field. “Just” a mathematician? Ha! I say. And again, Ha!

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Tue, 04 May 2004 08:59:16 +0000

There’s a good essay in the collection “In a Realistic Spirit” by the Wittgenstein scholar Cora Diamond, comparing Ramsey’s sophisticated neo-Humean account to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. So close, yet so far away. Of course, Wittgenstein’s opinion was that Ramsey was not really a philosopher, but just a mathematician.

By: David

David — Tue, 04 May 2004 02:34:27 +0000

Here’s a link to a BBC Radio tribute to Ramsey: http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/RamseyLect.html His brother, Michael, was an Archbishop of Canterbury. Quite a family.

By: Prof B

Prof B — Tue, 04 May 2004 01:42:34 +0000

I am an economist and of course I know of Ramsey’s work and the tragic story of this early death, after several seminal contributions to the field. But a philosopher on the order of Wittgenstein? Wow. Who knew? Next you will be telling me that Malthus was a pastor, Nash a mathematician and Kahneman a pyschologist ….