Academic Life
Ramsey returned to England in 1924, and with John Maynard Keynes's support he became a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, being the second person ever to be elected without having previously studied at King's College.
In 1926 he became a university lecturer in mathematics and later a Director of Studies in Mathematics at King's College. Ramsey and Keynes cooperated to try to bring Ludwig Wittgenstein back to Cambridge (he had been a student there before World War I). Once Wittgenstein had returned to Cambridge, Ramsey became his nominal supervisor. Wittgenstein submitted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as his doctoral thesis. G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell acted as examiners. Later, the three of them arranged financial aid for Wittgenstein to help him continue his research work.
In 1929 Ramsey and Wittgenstein regularly discussed issues in mathematics and philosophy with Piero Sraffa, an Italian economist who had been brought to Cambridge by Keynes after Sraffa had aroused Benito Mussolini’s ire by publishing an article critical of the Fascist regime in the Manchester Guardian. The contributions of Ramsey to these conversations were acknowledged by both Sraffa and Wittgenstein in their later work.
Read more about this topic: Frank P. Ramsey
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