Still working my way through Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes. Frank Ramsey appears only in passing, but the book manages to suggest what a terrible loss it was when Ramsey died, just short of his 27th birthday. His contributions to mathematics, philosophy and economics bring to mind Tom Lehrer’s line, “It’s sobering to reflect that by the time Mozart was my age, he’d already been dead for two years.”
There’s no telling what he’d have done, had he lived. But it seems to me that, sociologically, he would have had a decisive and positive effect on the philosophical community. Although right at the center of Cambridge intellectual life, a member of the apostles, and the translator of the Tractatus, Ramsey never showed any sign of falling under the spell of Wittgenstein. He thought the Tractatus was terribly important, of course, and that Wittgenstein was worth taking a lot of trouble to understand. But he seems to have been immune to the hold Wittgenstein tended to have over other philosophers. Ramsey seems to have been, along with Sraffa, one of the very few people at Cambridge who felt able to tackle Wittgenstein head on and whom Wittgenstein respected. But where Sraffa was withdrawn and a bit solitary, Ramsey was outgoing, likeable and in the thick of things. His character was in sharp contrast also to Wittgenstein, who — when he wasn’t directing monologues at people — was rude and insensitive to an amazing degree. I think it would have done twentieth century philosophy a power of good to have someone like Ramsey around the Cambridge colleges as a counterweight to Wittgenstein, both because he had a mind of the same magnitude but quite different cast, and because he provided an appealing alternative model of what genius can be. It might have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble.
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 ….
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.
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.
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!
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.
Here’s my paean to Ramsey, from a little over a year ago: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_stuartbuck_archive.html#93314001
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
;)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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