Soroush Marouzi

We offer a novel interpretation of Frank Ramsey’s talk, “On There Being No Discussable Subject,” delivered to the Cambridge Apostles Society in 1925. We suggest that Ramsey aimed to present a reductio ad absurdum argument. His argument was that if the prevailing philosophical outlook among the Apostles were true, then we would conclude that there is nothing to discuss in the Society. Ramsey believed that this conclusion is absurd. His point was to challenge the Apostles by telling them that their theoretical philosophical commitments fail to explain why, indeed, there is much to discuss in the Society in practice. Exploring Ramsey’s reductio argument motivates a new historical explanation for the pragmatist philosophy he developed in the second half of the 1920s. It also facilitates a new reading of his pragmatism and its significance. More specifically, we argue that Ramsey developed his pragmatism partly due to his concern that the prevailing philosophical outlook within Cambridge-based intellectual circles, such as the Apostles Society, seemed to fail to account for the epistemic value of their members’ non-expert conversations with each other. His pragmatism left us hints about how to make sense of the epistemology of disagreements in our daily social lives.

"Look before you leap!" they say. I may not. This proverb captures the gist of the prevalent accounts of rationality. It suggests that one who wants to act in a rational way needs to deliberate about the relevant features of the context of action. I argue that there are cases in which people do not look before they leap, and yet they leap successfully because they possess certain capacities. I show that these capacities are rooted in one's habits and in what it takes to put those habits into work in a right way. One who wants to leap successfully in a habitual way needs to cultivate the relevant reliable habits, know how to execute those habits, and know what reliable habit to act from in the situation at hand. The result is an account of rationality that suggests "don't look before you leap!" if certain conditions are met. My account of rationality is informed by under-explored conceptual resources articulated in Frank Ramsey's philosophy and John Maynard Keynes's economics, which were developed during the interwar period in Cambridge. I bring these resources to light by developing a historical narrative of the interdisciplinary debates on human nature and rationality that emerged in the wake of the Great War in Cambridge. The experience of war prompted many Cambridge-based psychologists, economists, and philosophers to explain a huge gap observed between actual human behavior and the ideal form of conduct in epistemic terms. They held that this gap partly originated from human irrationality, ingrained in the propensity to leap without looking. Consequently, two types of normative proposals emerged: one advocating that individuals should always look cautiously before they leap, while the other posited the necessity for individuals to cultivate the ability to make rational leaps without looking. Advancing normative proposals aligned with the second type, Ramsey and Keynes left us rich conceptual resources to address what it takes for one to have the capacity to leap successfully without looking. I employ these resources to begin to construct an account of rationality that has us acting on intelligent habits in highly uncertain situations.

I argue that the outbreak of World War I facilitated a shift in the dominant view of human nature in the Cambridge-Bloomsbury intelligentsia, steering it away from an optimistic view toward a pessimistic one. The conceptualization of human reason and rationality in this group, however, remained intact through the war. Frank Ramsey and John Maynard Keynes produced some of their most notable works in this evolving intellectual context. They followed the interwar orthodoxy by adopting its description of human nature. But they departed from the orthodoxy by revising its underlying conceptual commitment concerning human reason and rationality. The article shows that Ramsey and Keynes developed their ideas in tandem. They argued for the pragmatist idea that our normative theory of human life ought to be sensitive to what we can ask from human nature. Ramsey made this argument in his philosophy; Keynes made it in his economics.

Frank Ramsey’s philosophy, developed in the 1920s in Cambridge, was in conversation with the debates surrounding intellectualism in the early twentieth century. Ramsey made his mark on the anti-intellectualist tradition via his notion of habit. He posited that human judgments take shape through habitual processes, and he rejected the separation between the domain of reason, on one hand, and the domain of habit, on the other. Ramsey also provided the ground to explore the nature of knowledge employed in acting from habit. That ground was passed onto Margaret MacDonald who came up with the distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to apply a rule (or habit), the distinction that set the stage for Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical project against intellectualism from the 1940s onward. Ramsey thus influenced Ryle’s account of knowledge through the channel of MacDonald.

This paper is an attempt to historicize Frank Plumpton Ramsey’s Apostle talks delivered from 1923 to 1925 within the social and political context of the time. In his talks, Ramsey discusses socialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Ramsey’s views on these three intellectual movements were interconnected, and they all contributed to his take on the policy debates occurring then on the role of women in economy. Drawing on archival materials, biographical facts, and the historiographical literature on the early interwar politics of motherhood, I show that Ramsey held a positive view of the feminist campaign for family endowment. He demanded government financial support for motherhood in recognition of the economic significance of women’s domestic works, which, as such, could bring economic independence to them. In addition, he found such an economic scheme compatible with the kind of maternalism endorsed by Freudian psychoanalysis—his favorite theory of psychology.