The Undergraduate Who Talked Wittgenstein Out of His Own Book

In 1922 a 19-year-old Cambridge undergraduate produced the English text of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His name was Frank Ramsey. He had not yet sat his finals. The book he was translating proposed that philosophy was over.

A year later he took a train to Puchberg in Lower Austria, where Wittgenstein had retreated to teach village schoolchildren, and spent two weeks going through the Tractatus line by line. Ramsey had objections. The picture theory of meaning was not airtight. The treatment of generality was wrong. The propositions of the book, by its own rules, came out incoherent.

Wittgenstein listened. He did not publish another book in his lifetime. When he later drafted the Philosophical Investigations, abandoning almost everything in the Tractatus, he wrote in the preface that his "grave mistakes" had been pointed out by the criticism of Frank Ramsey, "with whom I discussed them in innumerable conversations during the last two years of his life."

Ramsey did not stop with one career. His 1926 paper Truth and Probability set out the framework for subjective Bayesianism: degrees of belief measured by the bets a coherent agent would accept. In 1927 he founded optimal taxation theory; the schedules are still called "Ramsey-optimal." In 1928 came A Mathematical Theory of Saving, which Keynes called "one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made." Ramsey was 24 and 25.

He also dropped a footnote that became its own literature. The Ramsey Test for conditionals: to evaluate "if A then B," hypothetically add A to your beliefs and ask whether B follows. That paragraph is the seed of the modern theory of conditionals.

In January 1930 Ramsey entered Guy's Hospital with jaundice after an abdominal operation. The cause has never been settled. He died on the 19th, twenty-six years old, the rest of his philosophy in notebooks the field has been mining ever since.