Frank Plumpton Ramsey, the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher, was one of the most brilliant men of his generation; his highly original papers on the foundations of mathematics, the nature of scientific theory, probability, and epistemology are still widely studied. He also wrote two studies in economics, the second of which was described by J. M. Keynes as "one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made." Ramsey's earlier work led to radical criticisms of A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, some of which were incorporated in the second edition of the Principia. Ramsey was one of the first to expound the early teachings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, by whom he was greatly influenced. In his last papers he was moving toward a modified and sophisticated pragmatism.

The Foundations of Mathematics

A stumbling block in the reduction of mathematics to...