Frank Ramsey

What a marvelous biography of Frank Ramsey. In his brief life, Ramsey quietly changed so much about how we understand ourselves. But for me, the really frustrating parts of this story center around Wittgenstein, who loomed large in Ramsey's live, and who, for all his brilliance and bluster, left us with little more than smug quietism about key philosophical methods and hopes. Ramsey's emerging pragmatism was so much more contructive. Misak is far too measured a scholar to put it so bluntly, but it's hard to avoid the sense that much of what now we take to be original in the later Wittgenstein owes chiefly to Ramsey's profound influence. If only he had lived.