Frank Ramsey

Frank Ramsey

Frank Ramsey

First published Wed Aug 14, 2019

Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–30) made seminal contributions to philosophy, mathematics, and economics. Whilst he was acknowledged as a genius by his contemporaries, some of his most important ideas were not appreciated until decades later; now better appreciated, they continue to bear influence upon contemporary philosophy. His historic significance was to usher in a new phase of analytic philosophy, which initially built upon the logical atomist doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, raising their ideas to a new level of sophistication, but ultimately he became their successor rather than remain a mere acolyte.

1. Life and Works

Ramsey was born in Cambridge on 22 February 1903. His father was a mathematician and Fellow of Magdalene College whilst his mother campaigned for women’s suffrage and other social causes. In 1920 Ramsey matriculated as an undergraduate student at Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1923 with a First in Mathematics. The year before he matriculated, whilst still a 17-year-old schoolboy, Ramsey became friends, through his father’s connections, with C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, also a Fellow of Magdalene. Ramsey had already read Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and G.E. Moore’s Ethics but because he had become interested in learning German, Ogden gave Ramsey Mach’s Die Analyse der Empfindungen [Analysis of Sensations] to read. Ramsey, still in his final school year, went on to read Louis Couturat, Henri Poincaré, and Hermann Weyl.

By 1921, Ogden had become so impressed by Ramsey’s philosophical acumen and facility with German that he commissioned Ramsey, as a second-year undergraduate, to translate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into English – in the face of Moore’s skepticism that the Tractatus could be translated into English at all. Back in 1920, Ramsey also discussed with Ogden and Richards their theory of thought and language, later famously elaborated in The Meaning of Meaning (1923), which Ramsey reviewed – unfavorably – in Mind (1924). Ramsey nonetheless praised “the excellent appendix on C.S. Peirce” and this leads him to study the volume of Peirce’s papers, Chance, Love and Logic (1923), which Ogden had just published in his book series for Kegan Paul. 

During Ramsey’s first year as an undergraduate, Ogden also arranged for him to meet Russell in London and encouraged Ramsey to attend Moore’s lectures with him and Richards; Ramsey duly went along in his second term to Moore’s lectures on “Incomplete Symbols and Logical Constructions”. Moore was later to recall “In the early twenties F.P. Ramsey attended at least one course of my lectures. I had soon come to feel of him, as of Wittgenstein, that he was much cleverer than I was” (1944, 35).

Reference:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ramsey/

The latest version of the entry "Frank Ramsey" may be cited via the earliest archive in which this version appears:

MacBride, Fraser, Marion, Mathieu, Frápolli, María José, Edgington, Dorothy, Elliott, Edward, Lutz, Sebastian and Paris, Jeffrey, "Frank Ramsey", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .