Frank Ramsey by Cheryl Misak. Kid only lived till 26 and changed the disciplines of Philosophy, Mathematics, and Economics. Ludwig Wittgenstein was reported to have said Ramsey was his only contemporary.
Here's an interesting BBC radio program [0] from 1978 on Ramsey. I came across this years ago and felt inspired to go into research. Of course, this program is a bit out of date and doesn't touch on his pragmatist turn much at all!
Two weeks ago I found John Maynard Keynes's 1951 volume Essays in Biography at Calico Books in Ventura (bookhounds like myself enjoy provenance details like that). He knew Ramsay personally, and one of the essays in the book is dedicated to him. I especially enjoyed the following passage by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson that Keynes quotes. Dickinson wrote this about Ramsay and also about C P Sanger, an older man who died about the same time:
It does not become a Cambridge man to claim too much for his university, nor am I much tempted to do so. But there is, I think, a certain type, rare, like all good things, which seems associated in some peculiar way with my alma mater. I am thinking of men like Leslie Stephen (the original of Meredith's Vernon Whitford), like Henry Sidgwick, like Maitland, like one who died but the other day with all his promise unfulfilled. It is a type unworldly without being saintly, unambitious without being inactive, warmhearted without being sentimental. Through good report and ill such men work on, following the light of truth as they see it; able to be sceptical without being paralyzed; content to know what is knowable and to reserve judgment on what is not. The world could never be driven by such men, for the springs of action lie deep in ignorance and madness. But it is they who are the beacon in the tempest, and they are more, not less, needed now than ever before. May their succession never fail!
wannabebarista|1 year ago
[0] https://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/20145
pmdulaney|1 year ago
It does not become a Cambridge man to claim too much for his university, nor am I much tempted to do so. But there is, I think, a certain type, rare, like all good things, which seems associated in some peculiar way with my alma mater. I am thinking of men like Leslie Stephen (the original of Meredith's Vernon Whitford), like Henry Sidgwick, like Maitland, like one who died but the other day with all his promise unfulfilled. It is a type unworldly without being saintly, unambitious without being inactive, warmhearted without being sentimental. Through good report and ill such men work on, following the light of truth as they see it; able to be sceptical without being paralyzed; content to know what is knowable and to reserve judgment on what is not. The world could never be driven by such men, for the springs of action lie deep in ignorance and madness. But it is they who are the beacon in the tempest, and they are more, not less, needed now than ever before. May their succession never fail!