News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
If much of the interest of high-quality papers lies between the lines—in the metaphorical fire that a paper lights in…
I would also recommend that potential grad students make inquiries into how far the compensation package actually goes towards cost…
It’s a mix. I’m still in the UAE with my family, and we feel safe. But some students and faculty…
In the above comment, Michel wrote: “As an aside, every once in a while I check out how the chatbots…
I could imagine LLMs having saved me a *ton* of time in graduate school–e.g., by having supplied reasonable answers to…
The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…
David Papineau says yes in a TLS review of a new book on Ramsey (by Ramsey's sister no less).
I'll confess I'm among those who think Ramsey was possibly the greatest philospher of the 20th Century despite having died at 26. Any Ramsey fans out there want to back me and Papineau up on this? Anyone want to call BS on that? Comments are open…
I wrote my own brief review of this book for Amazon 6 months ago, ending with this:
"For a person who produced an impressive amount of work in his short life, he had a remarkably prescient (and Kantian) view of publication. In a letter to his mother in 1924 (p. 182) he wrote: 'No one can suppose that you can't research for six months without having a paper ready by the end; if everyone wrote a paper every six months, the amount of trivial literature would swell beyond all bounds. Given time I shall produce a good paper, but if I hurry it will be ill-written, unintelligible and unconvincing.' But before we take any comfort in this defense of reasonable productivity, we should also realize that Ramsey's fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, required 16 hours of teaching a week, even through most of the summer (p. 217)."
Agreed! He made major contributions to several fields besides philosophy as well. Sylvia Nasr writes about him in her history of economic thought in the 20th century, The Grand Pursuit. There is also a short kindle single e-only book about him called Shooting Star which is pretty superficial. A full scale intellectual bio is needed.
Cheryl Misak has been doing working on Ramsey, particularly seeing him as a conduit for bringing Peirce's influence into the tradition of subsequent analytic philosophy. There's a YouTube video (I've got limited connectivity at the moment or I'd drop in a link, but an easy search will find it) of her lecturing to a group of philosophers in Cambridge, England on this topic.
(Beyond that, I have no direct experience with Ramsey's work. Any starting recommendations for us?)
Word.
Rob Tempio mentions Shooting Star, by Karl Sabbagh.
There is also Better than the Stars, a radio broadcast by D H Mellor, which is now available, with transcript, here:
I love his paper on universals (which is really about the concept/object distinction).
That's a terrific review by Papineau. (Thanks for the link.) And he lists some pretty impressive achievements. But to be the greatest philosopher of any century, don't you have to accomplish more than any other philosopher. Ramsay had awesome achievements for one so young. Did he have greater accomplishments than any other philosopher?
Few philosophers make important, enduring contributions to mathematical logic, probability theory, and shape economics for a century. He may not be the best philosopher of the 20th century, but he may well have been the most influential per paper published.
No, simply because of his shortened life. But, counterfactually, arguably yes.
Ramsey was a phenom. I think he's analogous to Turing, and so — yes, I would say that he's not obviously not the greatest philosopher of the 20th century (just as Turing is not obviously not the best computer scientist of the 20th century — sheer numbers of contributions to the field notwithstanding).
He was great– I'm in full agreement with that– but not perfect. At the end of "Facts and Propositions" he commits a petitio principii in giving a modal argument against the view that universal quantifications are somehow more than mere infinitary conjunctions: Ramsey ineffect presupposes the Barcan principle in an argument to the conclusion that there couldn't have been things other than those that actually exist. I tried to write a note about this once, and (occasionally my Daimon givesme useful hints) realized that Ramsey's paper had originally been given to a Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, so had been published in PASS, so probably had been accompanied by comments… and looked it up. The commentator was G.E. Moore. Not only did Moore pick up on the modal fallacy (so, no: the first modern work on quantified modal logic was NOT by Carnap and Barcan, but by Moore two decades earlier), but he systematically wiped the floor with Ramsey over a whole series of failures of rigour.
So was Ramsey the greatest philosopher of the 20th C? I don't know, but it seems to me thatover the past couple of decades appreciation of Ramsey has increased, and appreciation of Moore perhaps decreased. (As I recall, when we had a poll on this some time back David Lewis beat out both Ramsey and Moore. But that is perhaps due to the appalling lack of historical awareness in the younger sectors of the electorate…)
I am surprised that no one mentions here that F. P Ramsey is by no means an unknown figure, and that he has received part of his due already . Since the 1950 s onwards Savage, Jeffrey, Davidson, then David Lewis andothers have written on him, and Hugh Mellor (and some others) have edited his writings, produced two collections on him , as well Nils Eric Sahlin who has written the first monography on Ramsey in 1990.
That talk of mine on The Origins of Cambridge Pragmatism was very much a first, introductory, pass at a rich topic. I'm hard at work trying to do some real justice to it. The upshot will be titled something like: Cambridge Pragmatism: The Influence of Peirce and James on Ramsey and Wittgenstein.
Well, I'd like to see one single footnote from a paper of mine shaping the literature in conditional logic and belief revision for the 90 years to come. (Not that I work primarily in those fields, though; but hey, neither did Ramsey!).
I'm interested in how much contributions to areas outside philosophy (as currently understood) people think should matter for considering G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) or G.O.O.T. (greatest of our time) debates. Ramsey is a pretty extreme case. You'd have to have a very very high view of his work to think that he had the best corpus of philosophical writings of the 20th Century. (Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Quine, Lewis, Kripke, etc were no slouches.) But his contributions to combinatorics, and to the theory of taxation and public savings, are way beyond what most of Ramsey's competitors did outside philosophy (as we now understand it). How much should this count?
Partially this turns on where you think the philosophy/non-philosophy boundary lies. Is the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem part of philosophy or not, for example? But I think on even a broad conception of philosophy, Ramsey's massively influential work in combinatorics and in public finance are outside philosophy, which makes it harder to assess.
It's striking how many of the greats of the history of philosophy would be huge figures in the history of thought had their philosophical writings had no impact at all. In that way, Ramsey is part of the great tradition from Aristotle through Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. Who are the present day equivalents?
Leave a Reply to Mohan Matthen Cancel reply