Frank Ramsey 1903 – 1930
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of extraordinary precocity who, in a career cut short by his death at twenty-six, made foundational contributions to mathematical logic, the philosophy of probability, the philosophy of language, and economics. His paper Truth and Probability set out the first comprehensive subjectivist theory of probability and a pragmatist account of belief, while his work on the foundations of mathematics and on Wittgenstein's Tractatus shaped Cambridge analytic philosophy in his lifetime. His influence has only grown since his early death.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“Beliefs are guides to action; their truth is their reliability.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“What we cannot say at all, we cannot say either; nor can we whistle it.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“Truth is the satisfaction of the conditions of an assertion.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“We must always be brought back to the experiments and the data.”
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Attributed to Frank Ramsey:
“Philosophy is the clarification of thought, not the discovery of new facts.”