THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 77
ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers
talk about Ramsey sentences, Ram-
seyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not
a few scholars believe that there are
Ramseyan seams still to mine.
P
hilosophers sometimes play the
game of imagining how twentieth-
century thought might have been dif-
ferent if Ramsey had survived and his
ideas had caught on earlier. That ex-
ercise 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 inter-
views 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 preco-
cious, 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 re-
ligious matters as well. Frank was an
atheist by the age of thirteen; Michael
entered the Anglican Church and be-
came the Archbishop of Canterbury.
By the last year of Frank’s school
days, he was apparently consuming
books about economics, politics, phys-
ics, 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 lan-
guage. In his aptitude for math, he
followed his father, a Cambridge math-
ematician and the author of textbooks
in math and physics. But Frank’s tem-
perament—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 sulki-
ness, quarrels, and rigidity. An obitu-
ary notice in the records of Magda-
lene College, where Arthur Ramsey
was second-in-command for twenty-
two years, described his rule as “aus-
tere.” In childhood, Frank’s way of deal-
ing with his father’s foul moods was
to slip calmly out of the room when-
ever 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 fem-
inist causes. Frank was similarly in-
clined; 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 in-
tellectual 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 his-
tory of economics, the lamentable
state of probability theory, and the
difficulty of writing. Ramsey was sev-
enteen at the time; Keynes was ad-
vising 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 math-
ematics, 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 Princi-
ples of Mathematics,” which argued
for the “logicist” view that mathemat-
ical 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 Rus-
sell’s that had dealt with self-referen-
tial paradoxes. (One famous example
concerns a barber who shaves all those,
and only those, who do not shave them-
selves. Does he shave himself ?)
Ramsey was also an enthusiastic,
though not uncritical, admirer of Witt-
genstein’s “Tractatus”—a book that
Wittgenstein, who first arrived in Cam-
bridge to work with Russell in 1911,
completed seven years later, as a sol-
dier in the Austro-Hungarian Army
interned in an Italian P.O.W. camp.
The “Tractatus” argued that philosoph-
ical problems are the result of misun-
derstanding 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 pal-
ace,” with its “vast staircase and innu-
merable reception rooms,” as he excit-
edly wrote home. They went to parties
and to the opera. Ramsey had not
known how immensely rich the fam-
ily was. (Ludwig lived very simply: he
had given all his money to some of his
siblings after their father died.) Ston-
borough’s elder son, Tommy, who was
studying mathematics at Cambridge,
once said that it seemed as if mathe-
matics were a part of Ramsey’s body,
which he used without thinking, like
his hands.
Ramsey was eager to discuss phi-
losophy with Wittgenstein, but this
time there was another reason for his
visit, too. Ramsey wanted to be psy-
choanalyzed: he was anxious about sex
and had been suffering from an “un-
happy 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 al-
most alarming. Ramsey, in his jour-
nals, 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 re-
plied, “Do you think once would make
