Frank Ramsey: “His Actual Achievement is Amazing”

Abstract

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (winter ): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn –; online – d:\ken\documents\rj\type\rj  .docx -- : AM Reviews FRANK RAMSEY: “HIS ACTUAL ACHIEVEMENT IS AMAZING”1 Nicholas Griffin Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on Canada l8s 4l6 ngriffin@mcmaster.ca Cheryl Misak. Frank Ramsey: a Sheer Excess of Powers. Oxford, Toronto and NewYork: Oxford U. P., . Pp. xxxvi, . £.; cdn$.; us$. (hb). isbn: -----. he death of Frank Ramsey in January  just before his twenty-seventh birthday, was the last nail in the coffin of the Cambridge school of mathematical logic.The Polish logician, Janina Hosiasson, was in Cambridge working on probability with Keynes when Ramsey died. She returned to Poland to report that little remained of “the logical school of Bertrand Russell”. Cambridge was left so destitute of logical talent that Max Black, who was in the final year of his MathematicalTripos when Ramsey died, was asked to recommend someone who could examine him on mathematical logic (Misak, p. ).Without Ramsey, logic as a subject of serious concern to philosophers withered, not just in Cambridge, but throughout the uk, for the next thirty or forty years. (Arthur Prior’s arrival from New Zealand in  began to put things right.) But mathematical logic was only one of Ramsey’s concerns: he made important contributions to economics, probability theory, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, decision theory, combinatorics and graph theory (in an area now known as Ramsey theory) as well as to areas of philosophy outside of logic. And he translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—as a second-year undergraduate at the age of eighteen. Since so many of his contributions were seminal it is astonishing that,  years after his death, we still do not have an authoritative edition of his writings and did not have, until now, a proper biography.2 1 Russell, review of Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics, Mind  ();  in Papers , p. . 2 The main collections of writings are: The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (), cited here as FM, much of which is reprinted (along with some T  Reviews d:\ken\documents\rj\type\rj  .docx -- : AM Misak is well known for her extensive writings on pragmatism and the pragmatists , but this, to my knowledge, is her first biography and it is a very good one. For a life so short, there is an extraordinary amount of material to cope with, most of it unpublished and scattered in archives around the world. Misak has been thorough in tracking it down and weaving it into a very readable biography.3 One of the problems of writing a biography of someone who contributed at such a high level to so many different fields, is that it is impossible for the biographer to have expertise in all of them. Misak circumvents this by having experts contribute “guest boxes” to explain Ramsey’s various contributions : Misak puts the work in context and gives a simple account for the general reader, then the expert has their box to give (often) a much more technical account. Here she follows the lead of Hugh Mellor who, in editing Foundations, brought in various experts to introduce the papers. In both cases it works well. So well in the present volume that I thought it a pity that their various boxes were not listed in the table of contents so that one could find them more easily. (The boxes—especially the philosophical ones—also show how many times Ramsey was groping towards, hinting at, or on the brink of something really important which emerged only decades later. There really seems no limit to what he might have achieved, though it is worth reminding ourselves that not all his roads could have been taken.) Misak herself, of course, deals with most of the philosophy (at least outside of mathematical logic). Not surprisingly, she claims Ramsey for the pragmatists. Indeed, she had already done so in her previous book, cleverly titled Cambridge Pragmatism : from Peirce and James to Ramsey andWittgenstein. I shall come back to Ramsey’s place in the pragmatic pantheon. Ramsey seems to have been born intelligent. He irritated his caregivers by calling out...