“Any biography of Frank Ramsey must start with, and be haunted by, his death”.
Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, has a life span but one tenth that of our sun; it’s a somewhat poetic principle in astronomy that the most luminous stars burn out the fastest. This cosmic principle seems to be mirrored in human experience. Alexander the Great, who conquered vast territories and redefined the ancient world, died at the age of 32. In music: Otis Redding at 25, Buddy Holly at 22, Tupac at 25. The arts have seen similar losses, with Jean-Michel Basquiat passing at 27 and Egon Schiele at 28. In mathematics, one is reminded of the 32 years life of that strange genius Ramanujan (chronicled in The Man Who Knew Infinity), to whom the Hindu goddess Namagiri whispered mathematical truth.
Yet in one of those tragic oversights of history, Frank Ramsey is seldom counted in such company. That a mind so fine, a heart so gentle, and someone so deeply human should perish at the age of 26, just when he was fully coming into his powers… puts a blanket of melancholy on the reader that is hard to shake off even after finishing the book.
Ramsey was a precocious youth, though not a child prodigy, who developed a voracious reading appetite at Winchester, before matriculating at Trinity College Cambridge in 1920, aged 17. At 19, while still an undergraduate, he translated Wittgenstein’s notoriously recondite Tractactus from German into English, and delivered a deep critique of Keynes’ Treatise on Probability which rattled Keynes and largely convinced the intellectual public that Keynes was incorrect. Notably, none of these side activities got in the way of Ramsey graduating as the Senior Wrangler at the age of 20. He became a fellow at King’s College shortly after, and was perhaps the only mind that could go head-to-head with Wittgenstein, Keynes, Moore, and Russell, each in their respective fields of expertise. All this while raising a family and being an active participant in the polygamous and free-thinking Bloomsbury Circle.
Ramsey’s contributions are hard to understate. The general pattern is that he brought a fierce creativity to each of the fields that he graced with his presence; his work was often decades ahead of its time, and formed subfields that created rich areas of future study.
In mathematics, we have Ramsey Theory, one famous result being that at any party with six people, there will be at least three mutual acquaintances or three mutual strangers. In probability, Ramsey developed subjective Bayesianism (commonly attributed to Bruno de Finetti rather than Ramsey), which treats probability as subjective degrees of belief that can be measured by considering betting odds. In philosophy, Ramsey wrestled with some of the hard problems of Truth and Belief, not to mention his role in translating, interpreting, and challenging Wittgenstein. Indeed, Misak believes that Ramsey’s death may have been a catalyst in creating the Later Wittgenstein.
Economics was something of a side hobby for Ramsey – he would dip into it briefly when life got too busy for him to do proper mathematics or philosophy. These sojourns were enormously productive! His papers on optimal taxation and optimal saving sparked the creation of two important subfields that have undoubtedly influenced economic policy. These papers, which Ramsey was initially reluctant to publish because he felt were too simple, were both selected by the Economic Journal in their 125th anniversary edition – “one of the world’s best journals of economics decided that two of its thirteen most important papers were written by Frank Ramsey when he was twenty-five years old”. Misak puts it well: “he roamed freely over philosophy, mathematics, logic, probability theory, and economics. Perhaps no one would ever again do so with such intelligence and skill”.
Ramsey’s intellect is undeniable, but I am moved more by his humanism. Eulogies wax lyrical about the graciousness of his character, his warm laughter, and his genuine interest in people. Unlike Wittgenstein, Ramsey was not a philosopher in an ivory tower, gnawing deeply on abstract problems and needing to be seen as the deepest thinker on a topic. He respected common sense, and much of his thinking was ultimately directed at the betterment of society. One gets the feeling that had he lived longer, Ramsey would have been a resounding force for humanism in the 20th century.
This is the rare biography whose standalone merits I can confidently articulate, even setting aside my admiration for its subject. Drawing from new primary sources, Misak critiques some of the existing narratives around Ramsey, hinting that the jealousy of his contemporaries played a part in the shaping of his legacy. The brief expositions of technicals concepts, provided by relevant experts, give a glimpse of the intellectual mountains that Ramsey scaled. Misak also indulges the reader with “what if” speculations – a particularly tragic one being “the most spectacular near-miss in the foundations of mathematics”, involving Ramsey and Alan Turing. Both became King’s College fellows at 22, shared an interest in the foundations of mathematics (and in fact lectured the same course), and both shared untimely fates. Had Ramsey not died a year before Turing matriculated, he would have undoubtedly been Turing’s supervisor at King’s. What heights could they have achieved together? Would Ramsey’s contributions have changed the course of the war? And what about Turing’s subsequent post-war research into computing? While such counterfactual speculations may never amount to anything, they do inspire somber reflection on the potentiality of life.
How does history choose who to lay its eyes on? Ramsey was certainly in the “room where it happened”, but perhaps by being shoulder-to-shoulder with giants like Keynes, Wittgenstein, and Russell, he graciously consigned himself to the sidelines of history. Or was it the fact that Ramsey was so far ahead of his time? Philosopher Donald Davidson coined "the Ramsey Effect" to describe the realisation that one’s splendid new philosophical discovery already existed within Ramsey's body of work. In either case, Misak has made a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy, deftly weaving together Ramsey’s ideas, personal relationships, and the intellectual milieu in which he shone so brightly, but all too briefly.