The Joe Walker Podcast - A Forgotten Genius — Cheryl Misak

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Cheryl Misak is a Canadian philosopher and the author of Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/misakSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ladies and gentlemen, this episode is brought to you by none other than my weekend email. Every weekend, I send out a few interesting links, articles, and sources that I've been reading. The other weekend, for example, I shared five links, including a new research article by former guest of the podcast, Dave Tuckett, on the use of narratives in financial forecasting, and the closing three paragraphs from On What Matters, Volume 3, by the late, great Oxford Oxford moral philosopher Derek Parfit. Before his passing in 2017, Parfit was the Socrates of our time. He wrote only two books. The first was Reasons and Persons and then came On What Matters.

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head to thejolly Swagman Podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. If you're new to the show, welcome especially. Do make sure you subscribe to or follow the podcast to never miss a new episode. We release them every week, usually on Mondays, Australian time, although my schedule has been haphazard this past month. On the 19th of January, 1930, Frank Plumpton Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, died at the age of 26. The world will never know what has happened, what a light has gone out, wrote Lytton Strachey,

a key figure in the Bloomsbury set, which counted among its members the writer Virginia Wolfe and the economist Maynard Keynes. Strachey's prediction turned out to be correct. Ramsey's name is little remembered, except by cliques of mathematicians, economists or philosophers whose entire subfields Ramsey birthed or recast. Regular listeners might be familiar with Ramsey's name from my two recent episodes with Zach Carter and Robert Skidelsky on the reign of Keynes. Ramsey was the young undergraduate who bested the economic titan in a debate over the very nature of probability, a debate the outcome

of which was to ripple through economics in important ways, from subjective Bayesianism to rational expectations theory. But economics wasn't the only discipline on which Ramsey left his mark. No fewer than 16 theories or innovations across mathematics, economics, and philosophy bear his name. Like a burning meteor, Ramsey's life was as short-lived as it was stunning. So how did he revolutionize entire academic disciplines all before the age of 27? What was his personality and why did he die so young? Helping me to answer these questions is my guest Cheryl Misak. Cheryl is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. She received her Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and she's the author of a brilliant biography published last year titled Frank Ramsey,

A Sheer Excess of Powers. While we don't get into the guts of subjective expected utility theory, where Ramsey arguably left his greatest mark, I suggest reading Ramsey's essay Truth and Probability and Sheryl's book for this, we sample some of the intellectual and personal highlights from Ramsey's astonishing life, from his Annus Mirabilis in 1929 to his explosive interactions with Ludwig Wittgenstein. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I hope you enjoy it too. Without much further ado, here is the great Cheryl Misak. Cheryl Misak, welcome to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Thanks for having me.

Cheryl, I wanted to say congratulations and well done on giving Frank the biography he deserved. How did you come to write the book? I had written a book or I was working on a book called Cambridge Pragmatism. And Ramsey was the philosophical hero of that book. It was a straight up philosophy book. And people just started to tell me that since I was working in the archives and I was writing so much about Ramsey that this biography needed to be written. And actually, Amartya Sen convinced me over lunch at Trinity College, Cambridge one day, just do it, he said. And I said, okay, I'll do it. Wow. Because nothing had been, or there was no comprehensive biography of Ramsey until yours, right?

His sister, his younger sister, Margaret Paul, had written what ended up being called a sister's memoir. And that started off as a biography, and there's a lot of biographical elements to it. But I think she didn't quite finish it and it's rough in some places. So yes, this is the first full intellectual biography. Frank was born on the 22nd of February, 1903. Who were his parents and what was his family like? He came from a very interesting family. His father, Arthur, was a kind of jobbing mathematician at Cambridge. He was a textbook writer,

no great shakes, but he was a mathematics don at Cambridge, so he was intellectual. And his mother, much more interesting, was an Oxford educated woman at a time when that was very rare. And she was a kind of social justice firebrand, interested in helping the poor, visiting the sick. She was a lefty and her politics really were absorbed by her son, Frank. The father was an angry, not very progressive man. And Frank definitely picked up his mother's politics, not his father's. At what stage was his genius apparent? It appears that it was apparent quite young. But, you know, the trouble is that parents will always amplify the glories of their children.

But there are all sorts of stories of Frank when he was really quite young, learning how to read by watching the billboards as he was pushed in his pram at a very young age and following politics at a very young age, and following politics at a very young age. And some of these incidents can be dated because there was a general election, and he was interested in who might win, and he was very young at the time. So stories get told of his brilliance as a toddler. You have to take them with a grain of salt. But clearly, we see the results. He did turn into a remarkable young man. And growing up in his household, what was the expectation

for Frank's future and his career? I think the expectation was that he would become some kind of academic. And so he more than fulfilled those expectations. And he arrives at Cambridge in 1920, probably at the most intellectually exciting time in the university's history, right? Sort of like an all-star cast of philosophers, economists. I think that's exactly right. It was right after the First World War.

So it was also an interesting time socially and politically in the history of Cambridge University. So Frank arrives very young because he was so brilliant and so he was pushed ahead in school. He was, throughout his school days, three years younger than all of his classmates. Then he graduates from Winchester College, very young, and arrives in Cambridge already three years younger, and now he's in there with all the vets who are six, seven years older than he was. And I think this had some effect on certainly his social life. He was a very large boy, and a very large,

still a boy then. And he arrived at Cambridge looking like he was as old as the others, but much, much younger, much less mature. And he fell in to step with them immediately intellectually, and in fact, exceeded his peers intellectually, but emotionally, he was still a little boy. And when you say large boy, he wasn't he was very tall right and also just big framed he was he was big frame very tall towards the end of his life he did get uh uh fat so he was he did he did he did think of himself as a as a as a kind of fat man right at the end of his life and you can see from the pictures he he gained a lot of weight uh i mean it right at the end of his life. And you can see from the pictures, he gained a lot of weight. I mean, at the end of his life, he was 26 years old.

So it wasn't that he was at the age where one tends to put on the pounds, but he certainly did. Yeah, I remember one photo of him at his walking holiday in the Alps and he's reclining on the grass and he's got a book in one hand and obviously chowing down on a piece of food in the other. So he dies on January the 19th, 1930, as you mentioned. He gets to live for 26 years. And so the 20s are really Frank's decade to shine.

And I'd like to dip into a few of the intellectual highlights with you. And you cover many of them in the book, Frank going toe-to-toe with some of the intellectual highlights with you. And you cover many of them in the book, Frank going toe to toe with some of the intellectual giants of his age and often coming off better. But the two I want to focus on are Wittgenstein and John Maynard Keynes. And I thought perhaps we could begin with Wittgenstein because at the age of 18, Frank is picked to translate Wittgenstein's Tractatus into English. Why did they pick Frank? Well, first off, it was very unclear whether this really difficult manuscript was even translatable.

So, G.E. Moore, who was one of the most important philosophers of the era, declared it untranslatable. It was full of the new logic that Russell and Whitehead and Frege had pioneered. So it was unfamiliar to a lot of people for that reason. But the Tractatus was also written in a very kind of punchy form as a series of numbered remarks. And people didn't know what to make of it. So it was not clear that there was anyone who could translate it. And someone, my guess is it must have been Russell, thought, well, it's obvious that the undergraduate,

Frank Ramsey, is the one who could do this. He knew the logic. He was a mathematics student. He was very interested in the issues. And indeed, he turned out to be a superb translator. To get to that point and to have an adequate understanding of philosophy and logic, what kind of books is Frank imbibing? He's only 18. What's he reading? What's he up to at Cambridge? In his last two years at Winchester College, Frank had an amazing reading list. A lot of books were given to him by a really quirky Cambridge Don, who was a family friend, Charles K. Ogden. But Frank had read Russell, a huge amount of mathematics,

the foundations and philosophy of mathematics. He'd read widely in economics, Marshall. He'd read lots of German mathematicians. His reading list, as I say, at the end of his time at Winchester, would have just failed anyone. It's just, it's, he was going through sometimes a very difficult book a day. So he had read very widely, and so he arrived at Cambridge very, very well prepared, but mostly self-taught.

He found his studies at Winchester very easy, came easily, you know, top in most subjects, and he kind of breezed through school, so he did a lot of self-education. Coming back to the Tractatus, what was the core argument of Wittgenstein's Tractatus? At the heart of the Tractatus is what gets called the picture theory of meaning. And the idea is that you can take our propositions, our meaningful propositions, and you can break them down into their simple elements. So, take a very simple proposition such as the cat is on the mat, and you break that down and you have a cat and a mat. And if the word cat links to an actual cat,

and the word mat hooks on to an actual mat, then the proposition is true. There's an issue, even with that incredibly simple proposition, the cat is on the mat, what do you do with the words the, or is, or on? What do they reach out to in the world and correspond to or link to? So this was the general idea of the Tractatus, that a meaningful proposition is one that can be broken down to very simple elements. Each of those elements corresponds to an object, a simple object in the world. And you can see how even with the cat is on the mat, there are problems, but there are big problems with propositions about what is right or wrong. What in the world does a term like goodness or that's unjust, so it's wrong to torture live cats. You can see that the word cat latches on to cats in the world. The verb torture, it's hard to know what object that latches on to, but certainly it's wrong, doesn't latch on to some object in the world called wrongness. So Wittgenstein said that these propositions of ethics were without sense.

They were nonsense. But he made an exception for them and called them sort of higher nonsense. The propositions of philosophy are literally meaningless gibberish. They don't latch on to things in the world, and Wittgenstein was very hard about them. They're just nonsense. Get rid of them. Except he had this tricky problem in that he had just spent quite a few pages setting out propositions of philosophy, and so by his own theory, these were nonsense, and he came up with this, what he thought was a clever solution to the problem.

He said, my propositions that I've just written down or uttered must be thought of as a ladder. You climb up on top of the ladder and then once you get on top and you look down and you see that all the philosophy is nonsense, you kick the ladder out from under you and you never utter another philosophical proposition. And Ramsey had a very nice comeback to this solution of Wittgenstein's. He said, what we can't say, we can't say, and we can't whistle it either. So you can't get away with saying that the propositions of ethics are nonsense, but somehow higher. That's kind of trying to whistle them. And then of the move about climbing the ladder and kicking it out from under you, Ramsey said, look, that's just

like the child at the breakfast table, where the parents say, say breakfast. And the child says, can't. And the parents say, can't what? And the child says, I can't say breakfast. Well, you've just said breakfast. Or what Ramsey would say, look, Ludwig, you've just said all this philosophy. You can't now pretend that you haven't. And the other subtext to the quip about, and you can't whistle it either, is that Wittgenstein was a very famous whistler. That's right. He used to walk around Cambridge whistling entire operas. Quite a strange character in many ways. Would it have been easy to be Wittgenstein's friend? No. The one commonality that all of Wittgenstein's friends and acquaintances had is that they all thought it was very, very difficult to be his friend. He was really prickly. He was completely unforgiving of even small slights where the friend couldn't figure out what the slight was in the first place.

And then Wittgenstein would cut them dead. Actually, he cut Ramsey dead for a few years because they had an argument about psychoanalysis. And he just refused to speak to him until Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929. And Ramsey found a way back into the friendship. The two were meeting quite a lot to discuss philosophy and Wittgenstein would come a couple of times a week to Ramsey's house on Mortimer Road and they'd have what Wittgenstein called wrangles in the third floor study. What were they wrangling over? So, this was in the last year of Ramsey's life, 1929, when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, and the personal dispute happened in 1925. But yes,

in the last year of Ramsey's life, Wittgenstein back back in Cambridge and they would get together at least once a week and have these philosophical wrangles. Wittgenstein's friend and Ramsay's wife, Lettice, describes them as follows. Wittgenstein would come into the house, he'd go up to the third floor, he'd put his head in his hands and he'd mutter, oh, I'm so stupid, this is impossible, nothing is right. And eventually he would come around to discussing philosophy with Ramsey and then engage in a long monologue, not let Ramsey get a word in edgewise until finally he managed to break through the monologue and then Ramsey would deliver what I think are really excellent criticisms of Wittgenstein's

picture theory of meaning. And one of the arguments in my book is that Ramsey really made Wittgenstein turn his back on the picture theory and turn his back on the Tractatus and become what we now think of as the later Wittgenstein. Can you elaborate a little further on the arguments that Ramsey put to Wittgenstein? Ramsey thought that the quest for logical purity that you find in the Tractatus, and also in Russell's logical atomism, and in the Vienna Circle's logical positivism, that this quest for purity, for certainty, to get the world exactly right, was just completely misguided. Ramsey called himself a pragmatist. He was influenced by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce,

the founder of American pragmatism. And Ramsey thought that you couldn't approach the concepts of truth and knowledge from this absolutist or objectivist perspective. You had to think of truth and knowledge as human truth and human knowledge. So the believer or the inquirer is not separable from the proposition that corresponds or fails to correspond to the world. So Ramsey said, look, what we have to do is think about human belief and then ask ourselves what human beliefs are useful,

what beliefs work, what beliefs get us what we want, what beliefs work in terms of helping us move around in the world and control experience. And that's what truth amounts to. How much do you see that view as coming out of that post-war generation who were kind of turning their backs on the worldview that in their eyes had kind of led to the great war you mean the logical pure view the idea that um the truth is what works. of human subjectivity, political subjectivity, that, if you like, caused this world of uncertainty and this world of chaos. So you find in the 1920s and 30s, as I said, the Vienna Circle, people like Carnap and Neurath, really searching for an objective grounding for all of human knowledge.

And that, you can see, as a way of reacting against what they saw as this terrible war of opinion or ideology. To tie off this thread, Wittgenstein eventually comes around to Ramsey's view. How long does it take him? It's clear that he started to talk about meaning not being a picture of reality, but as being what is useful to us, what works for us, what works in practice. He started talking in these ways in 1929 and throughout the early 1930s, and then really by 1940, he had become the Wittgenstein who thinks that practice is what is primary, and meaning is use, and this is, as I said said what the later Wittgenstein is.

The second tussle I'd love to speak with you about is Ramsey and Maynard Keynes and the big debate between these two centers around Keynes's treatise on probability published in 1921. What was the argument that Keynes set out, and then what did Ramsey think of it? So Keynes, very much in alignment with Wittgenstein. So back to Wittgenstein for a minute. Wittgenstein started writing the Tractatus before the First World War. He'd come to Cambridge to work with Russell, and he wrote the Tractatus literally on the front. He was

fighting for the Austrians. And so at the end of the First World War, he had this manuscript. So you have to really think of the Tractatus as starting before the war and finishing right after the war. Same thing with Keynes' treatise on probability. He had started it before the war and it took him a long time to finish it. He was doing other things, such as all of his really fantastic work during the war with the Treasury. But in 1921, he produces this book, it's published. And like the Tractatus, it is about a kind of logical purity. So Keynes says that probability, the probability that A will happen if B happens. Probability is a matter of the logical relations between propositions.

It's an objective thing. It's measurable. And Ramsey, he was an undergraduate at the time, same time he's taking on or thinking through the Tractatus, he argues against Keynes' objectivist account of probability and says, look, probability isn't a matter of the objective relations between propositions. There's no objective probability that my rug is blue if the cat is on the mat. You can take any two

completely unconnected propositions and there won't be a probability relationship between them. But on Keynes' view, it seems that there has to be. He had many more objections, some of them very technical. But basically, his worry was that probability isn't like that. Probability is a matter, again,

of what is reasonable to believe for human beings. So Keynes also had a quest to justify inductive inference in his treatise on probability. So inductive inference is that you infer from the fact that every swan you've ever seen has been white, that the next one you see will be white. And you can see how this is related to probability. And Ramsey said, look, there's no objective justification of inductive inference. You take the all swans are white conclusion. Well, it looked reasonable for a long time. But then when people went to Australia, they saw black swans, and it turned out that their well-founded inductive inference turned out to be wrong. So Ramsey said, look, both probability and the justification of induction are about human belief.

The justification for induction is that we have to rely on inductive inference. We literally can't even get out of our chair and leave the room without relying on inductive inference. Every time I've moved my legs in this way before, I've lifted myself out of my chair. So Ramsey says, of course, inductive inference is a reasonable human habit. You won't find its justification in some more objective manner. You just have to see that it's a reasonable habit for human beings to have. And then you can ask all sorts of interesting questions about what kinds of inferences we should make using this mode of argument. And I think Keynes says this after Ramsey dies in 1930, but Keynes was very shaken and indeed wrote very magnanimously of

Ramsey's challenge, but he also thought that it doesn't really get to the bottom of induction, just to say that it's a mental habit. To what extent do you think Ramsey really changed Keynes' mind on probability. I think that you're completely right, that those who seek a watertight justification for induction are never going to be happy with the idea that induction is justified or vindicated because it's a habit that we can't do without. So there's always a quest for something more objective. You'll find the same thing with those who quest after a concept of truth that's more than the idea that a true belief is the best belief for human beings to have.

So Keynes was always hankering after something more watertight with respect to induction. But he did see that Ramsey had successfully sunk his theory of probability. As Keynes' friend Clive Bell, who was actually living with Keynes when Keynes was writing the treatise on probability, said, he said, Ramsey pulled a stitch in Keynes' theory of probability and caused all the stitches to run, right? So it caused the whole garment to sort of fall apart. So, Keynes never came up with a better account of probability, but he was always a little bit unsatisfied with Ramsey's idea that probability is subjective

degree of belief and measurable in terms of whether that belief works or not. What about you, Cheryl? Are you unsatisfied with Ramsey's idea? No, I'm a complete Ramseyan. And in fact, I was before I started to work on Ramsey. So, my background is very much in American pragmatism. And all of us who work in American pragmatism have known that Ramsey called himself a pragmatist and was influenced by Peirce. But it was only when I really leapt into his work that I thought and saw that actually Ramsey is probably one of the best, if not the best pragmatist out there. So I'm completely with him. And the flow-on consequences for economics are difficult to overstate. This obviously births expected utility theory, subjective Bayesianism.

Do you think that in winning that argument, Ramsey has had an overall positive or negative impact on the economics profession? His impact on the economics profession is very interesting. out how to measure partial belief and really was the founder of expected utility theory, which underpins all of economics and most of social science as well. But he was really clear that you couldn't mathematize economics, that mathematics had a role to play in economics, but it was a highly idealized role. So he would say things like, look, no one can really make their beliefs align with the probability calculus. No one is rational in the sense of being a perfect utility maximizer. So he founded the idea that rational belief is the maximization of utility.

He didn't found it, but he showed how to measure partial belief so as to make the idea really work. But he was skeptical of it as a way of doing real world economics. That said, most economists know of Ramsey because he wrote two papers in economics and they were straight up utility analyses and each of these two papers founded a sub-discipline of economics. So one was on optimal taxation, and the other was on optimal savings. And if you go into any economics department as a graduate student, one of the first things you'll learn about

is Ramsey on these two important really utility maximization calculations. So he was brilliant at doing these utility analyses, but he was skeptical about them. He thought that they were only good for highly idealized agents, and no one was perfect in the way that this method seemed to suggest. Interesting. It's a very complicated relationship to modern economics.

Yeah. Last year, I had Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England on the podcast. He and John Kay published a book called Radical Uncertainty. But the way they summarized the debate between Ramsey and Keynes was, as you know, Cheryl, Ramsey wins the debate by arguing that anyone who didn't attach a consistent set of subjective probabilities to all uncertain events would be vulnerable to a Dutch book. In other words, they'd lose money if they bet at those probabilities. But King and Kay think that that argument is nonsense because it's strange to say that the way people gamble gives us any insight into rational behavior under uncertainty and in reality we shun randomness we don't take bets at every possible turn we

kind of observe that distinction between risk and uncertainty. From what you're saying, Ramsey also intuited that distinction and thought it was potentially inappropriate to apply his ideas in the way that the economics profession eventually applied them? Yes, that's exactly right. So he set economics on this highly idealized, mathematized course, but he was skeptical about it. So one of the things that I uncovered

when I was writing the biography is that while Ramsey was writing these two path-breaking papers in economics, he was running around Cambridge giving a talk called Mathematics and Economics and arguing against the very conception that he was setting out in these papers. So if you had met him in 1926,

you would have encountered a very complex thinker. But our impressions of Ramsey these days is that no, you know, he put forward these brilliant arguments about how rationality is consistency with respect to the probability calculus, and he put forward the subjective utility maximization model, and he is responsible for the state of modern economics being so highly idealized and highly mathematized. But as I say, that wasn't Ramsey. If you look at the papers that he was running around Cambridge reading at the time, he was

throwing a spanner in the works of the very machinery that he set up. There's another interaction between Keynes and Ramsey that I find very interesting. It's lesser known, but I find it interesting because of what it says about each of the men, respectively. And that's a conversation they have about a paper that Ramsey writes, and their point of difference is around discount rates. Do you recall that paper and the point of difference? So, this was a paper that Ramsey wrote on how much a nation should save for the future.

Yes, yeah. And in economics, in utility theory, there's an immediate problem about saving for the future, for future generations. And that's that, well, those future generations might not exist. There might be some nuclear catastrophe or world war that wipes them out, some germ in the drinking water. So it looks as if, from a utility calculation point of view, we should discount the value of future generations because they might not exist. And here's another way in

which Ramsey was not the champion of utility theory that he's often taken to be. So in that famous paper, it's called The Mathematical Theory of Savings, he says that it is ethically indefensible to discount the well-being of future generations. So he's throwing a point about ethics or justice into the utility calculation, and he refuses to discount them. What does it mean to be a genius and does Ramsey qualify? I personally don't really like the term genius. It gets thrown around a lot. But if we're going to think that some people are geniuses, then Ramsey certainly counts. He made real indelible marks on, depending on how you count, four or five discrete disciplines. Philosophy, economics, the foundations of mathematics, probability theory. He was an amazing,

he had an amazing mind. And when you think that he died just shy of his 27th birthday, it's very hard to not just shake your head and say, oh my God, he was a genius. If anyone was a genius, he counts. One of the striking things about some of his most lasting contributions, his strokes of genius, if you will, is that they were almost asides, like they weren't the main game for him. That paper on obstacle taxation, for example. Is there anything in that that we can learn?

Well, here's the most alarming, if you like, example of this phenomenon that you just mentioned, that a lot of Ramsey's most famous innovations and ideas were almost asides. So, he's writing a paper in the Foundations of Mathematics trying to solve Hilbert's decision problem, 1928, and does a very kind of philosophical foundational paper. But he decides that he needs to prove a lemma. So he literally steps aside from the main argument, which is about the philosophy of mathematics. And he writes eight pages of proof. And those eight pages are now Ramsey theory in combinatoric mathematics. This is an incredibly fruitful domain of pure mathematics. Again, you go to any math department, you'll find a couple of Ramsey theorists. And it literally was an aside.

He stepped, as I say, away from his primary philosophical argument to prove this. So this is a feature of his thought. In philosophy, there are a whole bunch of things named after him. Ramsey sentences, Ramsey conditionalization. And Ramsey conditionalization, and Ramsey conditionalization, I won't go into it, is literally a footnote in a draft of the paper that he wrote. And we have now famous philosophers spending decades working on this footnote of Ramsey and showing how it's

really fruitful. Same thing in economics. He writes these two papers. Keynes kind of, one almost wants to say, bullied him into writing them. Keynes encouraged him to write them. And Ramsey, there's one very charming letter he writes to Keynes. He says, okay, here's the draft of this paper. I really want to finish it because it's distracting me from the more fundamental philosophical questions that, you know, obsess me at the moment. So he writes these two papers, and they're distracting him from his main business. And each of these papers was included in a volume that the Economic Journal, which was Keynes' journal, put together for their 125th anniversary. So 125 years, one of the most important journals

of economics, they choose their 13 greatest hits, and both of Ramsey's papers are included. And the editors have to say, look, we have to explain why we've included two papers by one person. I'm sure there are lots of disappointed economists out there or fans of various economists who are disappointed not to have their person in this volume. And they explained it by saying, look, each of these papers, you know, sparked a branch of economics, we had to include them. And they explained it by saying, look, each of these papers, you know, sparked a branch of economics. We had to include them. And again, they were kind of asides for Ramsey. Should we infer from that phenomenon that many of his strokes of genius were asides,

that he was like an intuitive genius rather than a plotter? He was an intuitive, he was much more an intuitive intellect than a plotter. And one frustrating thing about reading Ramsey in philosophy, in economics, in mathematics, is that everyone says that he never slowed down to fill in the details of his proof or to fill in the details of his argument so that we mere mortals could follow nice and easily. And there's one paper where he says,

much to the eye rolls of subsequent generations, oh, this is too boring to write out the details of this proof. And, you know, 30 years later, someone finally figures it out. Right. So, in that sense, he must have been a poor teacher. He, surprisingly, was not a poor teacher. His students absolutely loved him, and they say that not only was he warm and friendly and informal

and said, call me Frank, which was not the norm in the 1920s Cambridge, but that he really was patient with them, took time to go through proofs with them. He used to say of all applied math, so he was a mathematics don in Cambridge. So he would say of the applied problems that, oh, I'm useless at applied math, I know nothing and then he would solve the problem by like going back to first principles like going back to you know newton and working it out and his students absolutely loved him which i suppose speaks to his character he was famously very genial and what were his personal relationships like

during this period of sort of the mid to late 1920s? So as I said at the outset, he was a very young man when he arrived in Cambridge, less mature than his fellow students who were war vets. And he was very messed up about his relations with women when he was an undergraduate. Everyone, you know, this was after the First World War, roaring 20s, everyone was having fun,

everyone was having a lot of sex, and he wasn't. So he was paralyzed with his relations with women. He happened to be interested in women. A lot of his closest friends were, what they called at the time, homosexual. But Ramsey happened to be interested in women, but he was paralyzed. And so he developed, towards the end of his undergraduate degree, a crush on a married woman who was part of that facet. And it wasn't that her being married was an obstacle, because there were a lot of affairs being conducted by this woman

and their whole group of friends. But she wasn't interested in having an affair with this young man. And so he took himself off to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed. And he was cured during this stay in Vienna. This was 1924. Although he probably was mostly cured by going off to see a professional woman really right after he arrived, and she kind of got him through his hurdles. But when he returned… Shaper than psychoanalysis.

That's right. He went through the psychoanalysis anyway, but I think he was probably cured before. But when he returned to Cambridge, he immediately contacted a woman that he had been interested in before he left, a woman named Lettuce Baker, who he then very quickly married because they were involved in a relationship and you could lose your job if you were found to be having sex when you were not married. And he was a very young, brand new mathematics don at King's College, Cambridge, and he was very worried about being fired if anyone found out that he was in this relationship. So they solved this problem of Ramsey's worrying about whether he was going to be fired by getting married. But his wife, Lettice, was very much part of Bloomsbury, and she was very clear that if they were going to get married, it had to be an open relationship.

And Frank was perfectly happy about this. This was his set as well. He was part of the Apostles, this secret Cambridge discussion group, which also was infamous for the number of affairs conducted within it. And he found another great love. So he remained married and completely devoted to Lettuce and their two daughters. But very quickly, he found a second love, a woman named Elizabeth Denby, progressive civil servant at the forefront of the housing movement for reforming housing for the poor. And they formed a kind of happy, open trio, as Lettice called it, and he had a very happy personal life. But his sex life with Lettuce Baker wilted.

No, no, no. No, no. They remained completely engaged and devoted to each other, but in a principled open marriage. Got it. Now, was Frank a member of Bloomsbury while he was an undergraduate? He certainly was on the periphery of Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf mentions him in one of her diaries.

She met him at a, probably at a lunch party of Keynes's when he was an undergraduate. And he was friends with lots of people who were in the Bloomsbury set. Lytton Strachey, for instance, went to Hamspray for weekends and hung out with that set. But certainly after he returned from Vienna and after he married Lettuce, he was much more at the center of Bloomsbury because Lettuce was. So what I don't understand is he was a genius, he was genial, he was tall, he wasn't, you know, deformed in any obvious way, and he belonged at least to the periphery of the Bloomsbury set, which even by the standards of today was remarkably promiscuous. So I don't understand why he struggled with women to such an extent that he had to go and get psychoanalyzed for six months in Vienna.

Well, when you say he was tall and, you know... Too tall. Yeah, not obviously. He was an awkward kid. And as I say, awkward, shy, bullied at Winchester, not at all confident of his social skills. And so it's completely unsurprising that he would have found matters of the heart difficult.

Got it. Talk me through the closing sort of months and days of frank's life how did he die 1929 the most productive year of his life and hence one has think, one of the most productive intellectual years of anyone's life just did an unbelievable amount of superb work. So things are going brilliantly for him. He's got two little girls who he's completely devoted to. He's got a wife. He's got this second great love.

Everything is coming together for him. He's writing a book on truth and probability. And he gets jaundiced, catches a chill after a feast at King's College and gets jaundiced. And there are all sorts of letters from people who knew him, who visited him during this time. They say Frank's getting yellower and yellower. He doesn't look well at all. And Lettice herself got some kind of flu

and Frank moved back to his father's house to give her a break from nursing him. So it was two or three weeks of not being well. And he actually raised the alarm. He wrote to Lettice and said, look, things, this is not going well. Can you contact your uncle, who is a surgeon at Guy's Hospital in London and ask him

what he knows about jaundice. So the uncle takes a look at Frank, comes to see him and by ambulance he was sent to Guy's Hospital in London where they to see if he had some blockage, and there was no blockage, and he died the next day. Wittgenstein was at his bedside, as was his wife, Lettuce. It's not completely clear from the death certificate just what the cause of death was. With some help of two really smart medical professionals, I have come up with a hypothesis based on all the letters and the descriptions of what was happening to him. One of them said, look, you know, this looks to me like

leptospirosis or Viles disease, because when they operated on Frank, they found not just his liver, but his kidneys also in what the, what lettuce reported was a frightful mess. And leptospirosis is a bacterial infection you get from often swimming in the river where the feces of animals has infiltrated. And both these medics said, yeah, you know, this makes sense. It looks like leptospirosis. There is leptospirosis in the river Cam. Frank did like swimming in the river, but one of them said to me, look, given the incubation period here,

he would have had to be swimming in late October. But now you can go onto the internet and Google weather, Cambridge, October 1929, and it turns out that it was an unusually warm end of October. So it's not inconceivable that he could have been swimming at the end of October in the river, and this might well have been what killed him. What's the reaction to his death among his family, among his friends, amongst the Cambridge community? They were absolutely gutted. Wittgenstein was so gutted that he, in a fairly typical fashion, behaved really badly. He wrote a letter. The letter doesn't exist anymore, but there are reports of it in Frank's family. Wittgenstein wrote a letter to

Frank's father saying, you killed your son. You didn't look after him when he was ill properly. And you go, who writes that kind of letter to a father grieving his son's death. But I think it was an expression of just how destroyed Wittgenstein felt about Frank's death. You know, Keynes wrote to his wife, Lidia Bokova, from the King's College senior common Room a week before Ramsey died. And he said, things are so calm in Cambridge. It's, you know, the holiday. Everything's lovely. And then the next letter he wrote to her was just devastating.

You know, Frank Ramsey has died. And then Keynes actually got on the telephone and he called everyone and the reports again are that he was massively upset. It hit Cambridge like a sledgehammer. Ramsey's friend, Braithwaite, wrote in his obituary of Ramsey that Ramsey would have found questions about

the meaning or purpose of life nonsense because that's what his philosophy claimed. Would Ramsey have thought questions about the meaning of life were silly? You know, so I think Braithwaite has it wrong. Braithwaite actually got most things about Ramsey wrong. It turns out that they weren't talking very much, Braithwaite and Ramsey, in the last year of Ramsey's life. I surmised in the book that the reason Braithwaite seemed not to know anything about what Ramsey was thinking in 1929. I surmise that it was because Wittgenstein came back and all the philosophical air was taken up by Wittgenstein. And Wittgenstein was very sniffy about Braithwaite. He didn't think Braithwaite was up to it.

And so I surmise that perhaps Wittgenstein just edged Braithwaite out. Since the book has been published, I've discovered something. Someone emailed me with a gem, and I'm not going to tell you what it is because it would be a spoiler. I'm right now working, just about finished, making corrections to typos and the like for a paperback edition and I have a bit of a revelation about Braithwaite that I'm going to drop in the paperback but to the meaning of life Braithwaite's wrong Ramsey did think that you could say things about the meaning of life. He has this wonderful paper he read in Cambridge in 1925, and I end the book this way. He says that his perspective of the universe isn't focused on the fact that the universe, or his perspective on the

meaning of life, isn't focused on the fact that the stars are massive and far away and eventually the universe is going to go up in flames or cool and die. His focus, his perspective is on the human and on what works best for human beings. And he was arguing against Wittgenstein, who was very gloomy. He was a depressive. And Russell, who was focused on the fact that the universe is so vast and will eventually burn up. And so what's the meaning of life in a human being in the context of this vast universe?

So Ramsey says, look, you can't focus on the vastness of the universe. You have to focus on human beings, what they're going through, what is good for them here and now. And he said, I'm optimistic. And that's the way to get through life in a way that is meaningful, not just to get through it in some plotting way, but that's the meaning of life. It's just to focus on making things better for human beings and being optimistic that you can do so. So he had some, I think, some very interesting and sensible things

to say about the meaning of life. And his life was full of meaning. He said in this paper, you know, I find the universe a wonderful place. And he had all sorts of reason to think that it was wonderful. He had everything going for him. He would have continued to make remarkable progress across this vast range of disciplines had he lived. But as we know, his life was cut short rather brutally. You're a philosopher, and Ramsey was a giant in the field he was also a pragmatist so obviously you already knew a lot about him before you started the period of researching for the book but during that period of intense research where you're learning a lot more about ramsey's work

and his life did anything you learned in that did anything you learned in that period kind of change the way you approach either your philosophy or your work? Even just down to, I don't know, like, did you learn anything about how to emulate Ramsey's levels of productivity? Well, so, a number of people have asked how Ramsey managed to do so much in such a short life that also was so rich and full of personal relations. And so I didn't have to learn this because I was already doing this. But Ramsey, like Bertrand Russell, was very principled about how he worked. Every day, every morning, he started off writing, even on holiday, probably on Christmas Day. And then after a couple of hours, maybe three, he stopped writing. And he went for a walk, and he took pupils, started teaching, did administration.

But every single day, he got his writing in first thing. And that is a pretty tried and true methodology for a lot of people, a lot of people who manage to get a lot done. So that's how he got all this work done. Yeah, and I had already done that. But I clearly learned so much by just diving into one life and one intellectual, incredibly fruitful intellectual period, that it has actually changed the way I do philosophy now. I'm right now working on Oxford philosophy in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Gilbert Ryle, John Austin. And as I speak with you, I'm in Oxford. And even though we're still somewhere in the UK, hopefully towards the end of a pandemic. There's one archive that is open, and I'm sitting with Gilbert Ryle's papers. And this is clearly something that I will continue

to do. And it's something that I really learned and has enriched my life through working on the Ramsey biography. Fantastic. Just to come back to those writing habits, do you know what time Ramsey would rise and begin writing? It's not written down. He wasn't a very good diary keeper. But one gets the sense from how he talks about his days that he probably started around 9 or 9 30 broke for lunch at uh at one o'clock and then the rest of the day

was free for all the other things he had on the go And when you say writing, is he just writing in a journal? And is he also reading or is he purely writing? I think that early morning period was for Ramsey a writing period. Reading happened in the afternoon. And he didn't write in a journal. Wittgenstein did all his philosophy in his journal. And Ramsey did all of his philosophy in economics and mathematics, probability theory, by either writing drafts of papers

or writing notes to himself. And we have much of this material still intact. It's at the Archives of Scientific Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. They bought Ramsey's papers. It's absolutely thrilling to go and be with the original documents. His handwriting was appalling when he was a schoolboy. So one of his schoolteachers at Winchester said to him,

look, don't even try cursive. You know, stick to printing. And so you have this almost childish handwriting, printing. You've got the most amazing proofs and the most sophisticated thoughts being set out in this very kind of childish printing. But we can kind of go through these materials and see how Ramsey's mind was working because he just jotted things down, and there they are.

They're perfectly legible, and you can see all these drafts of his papers. Unfortunately, very little was published. And almost everything is in this unfinished draft form. So there's a lot of filling in that the reader of Ramsey has to do. When you write, do you write with a pen or on a computer? I write on a computer. And I also tend to write drafts right away, not so much notebooks. But I'm not emulating Ramsey. I always did this. One very interesting thing is to take a look at, say, Braithwaite's archives in Cambridge. And you see how Braithwaite also starts off with pencil and paper in the 1920s.

And then he moves to, you know, kind of photostat and photocopying. And then by the end of Braithwaite's life, you know, he's on the computer and you have computer printouts. And when you think about that, you know, they're both born in the early 1900s. Braithwaite lives till he's mighty old. And Braithwaite, Ramsey's exact contemporary, lived to write on a computer. And yet Ramsey dies in 1930, which seems like, you know, like a different era altogether. Wow. So, I sometimes think it's pointless to think in counterfactuals, but what do you think Frank would have gone on to do or achieve

had he not died so young? So, interestingly, Ramsey had a view of how counterfactuals could be, if not true, could be rational. Useful, right. Yeah. So, his theory of counterfactuals, and that's the footnote that I mentioned earlier, he says, look, if you take your stock of beliefs and add the counterfactual, had Ramsey lived, then he would have done such and such. You can see how your beliefs might change by adding that counter-de-fact antecedent. Had Ramsey lived, then such and such. And some counterfactuals are not going to be reasonable.

Had Ramsey lived, he would have been a brilliant billiards player. Well, that's not a reasonable counterfactual because he was awkward and he was never going to be a brilliant billiards player. But I think we can say, had Ramsey lived, he would have finished the book he was writing. It would have made a huge impact on philosophy. That was very much a philosophy book, as it was that the drafts that he was writing were only published in 1991, I think. So he dies in 1930, and only in 1991 does the world kind of get a glimmer of what he was trying to set out in this book. And there are very much drafts, unfortunately. But he would have finished that.

There's no reason to think that he wouldn't have continued to make huge advances in economics and mathematics and probability theory. So, the world has lost, or the world lost, I think, one of their most sparkling minds ever. Cheryl Mizak, I've really enjoyed our our conversation thank you so much for your time i look forward to the paperback edition is there a publication date for that yet i i think probably five or six months it should be up okay until then i can only speculate as to what you were told about braithwaite, but Godspeed and thank you for your time. Thank you. Cheers. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Two things before you go. One, if you want to read the transcript or the show notes for this episode,

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