Frank Ramsey—a philosopher, economist, and mathematician—was one of the greatest minds of the last century. Have we caught up with him yet?

By Anthony Gottlieb, The New Yorker, April 27, 2020

“The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.”

Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was “distinctly nervous” when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was “very much cleverer than I was.” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess.

When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it “one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made.” Its most controversial idea was that the well-being of future generations should be given the same weight as that of the present one. Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.” In the wake of the Great Depression, economists had more pressing concerns; only decades later did the paper’s enormous impact arrive. And so it went with most of Ramsey’s work. His contribution to pure mathematics was tucked away inside a paper on something else. It consisted of two theorems that he used to investigate the procedures for determining the validity of logical formulas. More than forty years after they were published, these two tools became the basis of a branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory, which analyzes order and disorder. (As an Oxford mathematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends.)

Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. He did little to advertise the importance of his ideas, and his modesty did not help. He was not particularly impressed with himself—he thought he was rather lazy. At the same time, the speed with which his mind worked sometimes left a blur on the page. The prominent American philosopher Donald Davidson was one of several thinkers to experience what he dubbed “the Ramsey effect.” You’d make a thrilling breakthrough only to find that Ramsey had got there first.

There was also the problem of Wittgenstein, whose looming example and cultlike following distracted attention from Ramsey’s ideas for decades. But Ramsey rose again. Economists now study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers talk about Ramsey sentences, Ramseyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not a few scholars believe that there are Ramseyan seams still to mine.

Philosophers sometimes play the game of imagining how twentieth-century thought might have been different if Ramsey had survived and his ideas had caught on earlier. That exercise has become more entertaining with the publication of the first full biography of him, “Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers” (Oxford), by Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. Drawing on family papers and records of interviews conducted four decades ago for a biography that was never written, Misak tells a more colorful story than one might have thought possible so long after such a short life ended.

Ramsey’s father, Arthur, claimed that Frank, his eldest child, learned to read almost as soon as he could talk. His political sense was precocious, too. One day, little Frank told his mother, Agnes, that his younger brother, Michael, was, unfortunately, a conservative:

You see, I asked him, “Michael are you a liberal or a conservative?” And he said “What does that mean?” And I said “Do you want to make things better by changing them or do you want to keep things as they are?” And he said—“I want to keep things.” So he must be a conservative.

The two brothers later diverged in religious matters as well. Frank was an atheist by the age of thirteen; Michael entered the Anglican Church and became the Archbishop of Canterbury.

By the last year of Frank’s school days, he was apparently consuming books about economics, politics, physics, logic, and other subjects at a rate of almost one a day. On the holidays, he learned German, so that he could read some volumes of mathematics and philosophy in their original language. In his aptitude for math, he followed his father, a Cambridge mathematician and the author of textbooks in math and physics. But Frank’s temperament—he became known for his jovial spirits and loud, infectious laugh—was in marked contrast to that of his father, who was less notable for his academic work than for his sulkiness, quarrels, and rigidity. An obituary notice in the records of Magdalene College, where Arthur Ramsey was second-in-command for twenty-two years, described his rule as “austere.” In childhood, Frank’s way of dealing with his father’s foul moods was to slip calmly out of the room whenever the going got rough. Perhaps it was this pacific ease that, later in life, enabled Ramsey to cope better than most with Wittgenstein’s frequent fits of tormented umbrage.

At a time when few women went to university, Agnes Ramsey studied history at Oxford, and also attended the logic lectures of Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll). She had been among the little girls whom Dodgson liked to take boating. More progressive than her husband, Agnes was an activist for left-wing and feminist causes. Frank was similarly inclined; at school, he was seen as an “ardent Bolshevik.” At university, he became involved in local politics and was a keen, though undoctrinaire, member of the Socialist Society.

The Ramseys were part of an intellectual aristocracy, in which Frank was comfortable from a young age. After his first meeting with Keynes, in Cambridge, Ramsey recorded that he found him “very pleasant”; on a walk, they had talked about the history of economics, the lamentable state of probability theory, and the difficulty of writing. Ramsey was seventeen at the time; Keynes was advising the League of Nations and the Bank of England, and lunching with Winston Churchill.

In his final year of secondary school, Ramsey decided to focus on pure mathematics, which is what he would earn his degree in, teach, and use as a tool. But philosophy was always what gripped him most. At school, he had read Bertrand Russell’s “The Principles of Mathematics,” which argued for the “logicist” view that mathematical truths and concepts can be derived from logical ones. Much of Ramsey’s early technical work in philosophy built on Russell’s logicist ideas and sorted through their ramifications. For one thing, he improved a theory of Russell’s that had dealt with self-referential paradoxes. (One famous example concerns a barber who shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?)

Ramsey was also an enthusiastic, though not uncritical, admirer of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus”—a book that Wittgenstein, who first arrived in Cambridge to work with Russell in 1911, completed seven years later, as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army interned in an Italian P.O.W. camp. The “Tractatus” argued that philosophical problems are the result of misunderstanding the logic of language. By revealing its real logic, Wittgenstein believed, he had solved them all. His account of logic enthralled Ramsey, who, in 1921, was recruited to translate the book into English.

A few months after his graduation, in 1923, Ramsey spent a fortnight in Austria, and grilled Wittgenstein about the “Tractatus.” The next year, in March, Ramsey returned and spent six months in Vienna. Wittgenstein’s youngest sister, Gretl Stonborough, took Ramsey under her wing, and he dined every week in her “baroque palace,” with its “vast staircase and innumerable reception rooms,” as he excitedly wrote home. They went to parties and to the opera. Ramsey had not known how immensely rich the family was. (Ludwig lived very simply: he had given all his money to some of his siblings after their father died.) Stonborough’s elder son, Tommy, who was studying mathematics at Cambridge, once said that it seemed as if mathematics were a part of Ramsey’s body, which he used without thinking, like his hands.

Ramsey was eager to discuss philosophy with Wittgenstein, but this time there was another reason for his visit, too. Ramsey wanted to be psychoanalyzed: he was anxious about sex and had been suffering from an “unhappy passion for a married woman,” as he put it in a letter to Wittgenstein. Keynes once observed that Ramsey’s simplicity and directness could be almost alarming. Ramsey, in his journals, noted down an exchange with the woman concerned, who was a close family friend: “Margaret, will you fuck with me?” he asked one day. She replied, “Do you think once would make any difference?” Ramsey seems to have believed that it would, and the matter depressed him, on and off, for two years.

In Vienna, he was treated by Theodor Reik, one of Freud’s first pupils. Initially, Ramsey found the sessions unpleasant and he was sometimes bored by so much talk about himself. He lent Reik a copy of the “Tractatus,” and was annoyed when Reik declared that its author must have some sort of compulsion neurosis. But after six months he told his parents that he found Reik “jolly clever,” and that being analyzed was likely to improve his work. Even the foundations of mathematics could be illuminated by psychoanalysis, Ramsey thought: guarding against one’s emotional biases would make it easier to get a clearer view of the truth. Ramsey returned to Cambridge in October, 1924, and evidently considered himself cured. Meanwhile, Reik told a friend of Ramsey’s that there had never been much wrong with him.

Ramsey, taking up a fellowship at Keynes’s college, King’s, began lecturing on mathematics. Tall and increasingly round, he had a lumbering grace, and acquitted himself well at lawn tennis; a friend, writing in her diary, described a broad face that “always seems ready to break into a wide smile.” He fell in love with Lettice Baker, a spirited woman five years his senior, who had excelled in science and philosophy as a Cambridge undergraduate and was working at the university’s psychology laboratories. They were married in 1925, just after an odd episode during a summer party at Keynes’s country place.

Several Bloomsbury figures were there, including Virginia Woolf and Keynes’s new wife, a Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein was, too. Lydia made the mistake of remarking, “What a beautiful tree,” presumably too casually, whereupon Wittgenstein glared and demanded, “What do you mean?” and she burst into tears. Wittgenstein also became annoyed with Ramsey, who took issue when Wittgenstein declared Freud “morally deficient.” Although Ramsey didn’t bear grudges, the two men had no contact for four years, except for a distinctly cool exchange of letters in 1927 about the logic of “=.”

In love and full of ideas, Ramsey said in early 1925, “I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place.” This was in a talk he gave to the Apostles, a select and venerable Cambridge discussion club. Ramsey’s main topic that evening was whether there was anything left for such clubs to talk about. The rise of science and the fading of religion meant that the old questions were becoming “either technical or ridiculous,” or so Ramsey argued. He half seriously suggested that conversation, except among experts, was now just a matter of saying how one felt and comparing notes with others. But he ended with a twist. Some might find the world an unpleasant place, yet he had reason on his side—not because any facts supported him but because a sunny attitude did one more good. “It is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.”

There was a broader philosophical picture behind his humor. He was attracted by the idea that beliefs of all sorts were best understood in terms of their consequences. He called this “pragmatism,” following the American philosopher C. S. Peirce, who died in 1914. Ramsey took the essence of pragmatism to be that “the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects. Of this I feel certain.” Part of “the essence of any belief,” he later wrote, is that “we deduce from it, and act on it in a certain way.”

In 1926, Ramsey composed a long paper about truth and probability which looked at the effects of what he called “partial beliefs”—that is, of people’s judgments of probability. This may have been his most influential work. It ingeniously used the bets one would make in hypothetical situations to measure how firmly one believes a proposition and how much one wants something, and thus laid the foundations of what are now known as decision theory and the subjective theory of probability.

Ramsey hoped to turn his essay about truth and probability into a book, which he worked on in the late twenties, but during this time he also produced two articles for The Economic Journal, which was edited by Keynes. One was the article on savings—Ramsey mentioned to Keynes that it was “much easier to concentrate on than philosophy”—and the other was about tax, and ultimately no less consequential. Its key proposal is that, given certain conditions, the rates of sales taxes should be set in such a way that the production of each taxed commodity falls by the same proportion. The tax article, like the savings one, eventually became the basis of a subfield of economics concerned with “optimal taxation,” and changed the way economists thought about public finance.

When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, early in 1929, Ramsey was eager to resume their philosophical talks, and it seems that Wittgenstein was as well. He moved in with Ramsey and Lettice until he found his own place, and the two men had intensive discussions throughout Ramsey’s last year. In a letter from this time, Keynes wrote to his wife that Wittgenstein had come to dinner and was “more ‘normal’ in every way than I have ever known him. One woman at last has succeeded in soothing the fierceness of the savage brute: Lettice Ramsey.”

Misak thinks that Frank Ramsey had a transformative effect on Wittgenstein at this time, too. She argues that it was Ramsey’s talks with him in 1929 that turned the Wittgenstein of the “Tractatus” into the Wittgenstein of the “Philosophical Investigations,” a summation of his mature work that was published, posthumously, in 1953.

In the thirties, Wittgenstein moved away from the formal logical system of his “Tractatus” and toward meandering explorations of the purposes to which language is put—the meaning of a word is, as he argued in his later work, often just its use. He was, in Misak’s account, adopting the sort of pragmatism that Ramsey had taken up. In the preface to his “Investigations,” Wittgenstein certainly credited Ramsey for helping him to realize “grave mistakes” in the “Tractatus.” But he claimed to be even more indebted to Piero Sraffa, a Cambridge economist. Too little is known about Wittgenstein’s conversations with either man to shed much light on his later thought. Besides, Wittgenstein always developed his own idiosyncratic take on the influences he absorbed: if Ramsey’s views went in, you can be sure that they would not be Ramsey’s when they came out.

After Ramsey’s death, Lettice earned money as a photographer, which led to audacious adventures in Cambodia and up the scaffolding of King’s College Chapel. She once told a friend that she had been tempted to have an affair with the impossible Wittgenstein, which would have been her biggest jape of all. Lettice and Wittgenstein stayed on friendly terms after Ramsey died, until one day she threw out his old bathmat and, outraged, he cut her off. As she remarked, he made “a moral issue out of absolutely everything.”

Ramsey’s temperament could not have been more different. Keynes wrote that Ramsey’s common sense and practicality reminded him of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. And, like Hume, he was plump, jolly, and fond of cards. One member of the Bloomsbury set recounted a poker night with Ramsey: “Frank, with the guffaws of a hippopotamus and terrible mathematical calculations, got all our money from us.”

It was not just a matter of girth and gaiety: there were philosophical parallels with Hume, too. The Scotsman wrote that the human mind “has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects”—that is, to mistake its own activities for features of reality. This was a theme of Ramsey’s work. Hume’s idea is what Ramsey was getting at when he wrote, in his last year, that there are many kinds of sentences that we think state facts about the world but that are really just expressions of our attitudes.

Nobody will know how far Ramsey might have taken this idea, or any other, if he had survived. Statements about what would have happened if things had been different are what Ramsey called “unfulfilled” conditionals. They express an attitude, he said, but do not correspond to any reality.

Link to Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak at Amazon

Link to the New Yorker article The Man Who Thought Too Fast, by Anthony Gottlied