Ramsey and the Vienna Circle 02

B RIAN M C G UINNESS

WITTGENSTEIN AND RAMSEY This is inevitably a tale of two cities – and it is fitting that (as I understand) a parallel celebration has been held in Cambridge. They were the two cities of Wittgenstein obviously enough, but in a measure of Ramsey too. Later than Wittgenstein (by the interval of their difference in age) he came to Vienna as a pilgrim, just as Wittgenstein had gone to Cambridge. He to learn from Wittgenstein as Wittgenstein to learn from Russell. But they were to find other things also in those cities – Wittgenstein the whole ambience of Bloomsbury, Ramsey the home of psychoanalysis, the family of Wittgenstein (like many visitors – and even later biographers – he seem to have fallen in love with Wittgenstein’s powerful sister) and the seeds of the Vienna Circle. My purpose is to see how the two men interacted intellectually and what that tells us about the two cities as intellectual centres. I would not propose a comparative evaluation of the two, for one obvious reason and for one less so – Ramsey died before developing all his powers, while Wittgenstein could die content that he had made his contribution. So much is obvious, but an overlap in the themes they treated has often obscured the fact that they were trying to do quite different things. Needless to detail here how before the First War Russell helped Wittgenstein to make the existential choice between being an aviator (in those days also a constructor of planes) and a logician, largely by bringing him into a group where he could make free use of his intellect. To be surrounded by Moore, Keynes, the Stracheys and even the younger Apostles (then practically the Cambridge branch of Bloomsbury) was a new experience for him. His family background was one of wealth and high culture but not intellectual to the degree cultivated in this new environment. Naturally he wanted to change them – for one, he maintained that mathematics would improve people’s taste because taste comes of thinking honestly. They were all against him. He even attempted to resign from their Society (the Apostles), thinking that the younger members “had not yet made their toilets”. The brittle arguments of the Society, where the paradoxical or the scandalous would be defended for sheer love of argument seemed to him intolerable. And there was another thing: all, even the older members, lacked what he called reverence: even Russell (whom, at that period, he still respected) was so Philistine as to appreciate the advantages of their age as opposed to previous ones. Still between them the members of this group set him on the way to writing his first and in some ways his greatest work. He was to repair Russell’s logic, he was to deal with Keynes’s probability in two or three paragraphs, and he was to

19 M. C. Galavotti (ed.), Cambridge and Vienna: Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, 19–28. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

20

BRIAN M CGUINNESS

show that ethics, Moore’s field, did not consist of propositions at all. And perhaps this is what they wanted from him: they “looked to him for the next big step in philosophy”, as Russell told Wittgenstein’s sister. The original Abhandlung, whose completion he announced to Russell in 1915, was the product of this Cambridge period, but the additions he made to it in 1916-18 (the passages on God, freedom and the mystical) issued rather from the next two phases in his life. Tolstoy’s religion had taken hold of him in the war and the circle of young disciples of Kraus and Loos whom he met in Olmütz acted as midwives to the utterance of what he had previously and, as he thought, necessarily left unsaid. Russell was shocked by the mysticism that thus entered in, while as for religion the least hint of it was enough to exile one from the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury. “We have lost Tom”, was Virginia Woolf’s comment on T.S. Eliot’s conversion. Still, when the manuscript turned up in Cambridge it made an immediate impression at least on one Trinity undergraduate. C.K. Ogden, as Hugh Mellor recounts, had helped Ramsey to learn German (from Ernst Mach’s Analyse der Empfindungen) while still at Winchester, for he won the German prize there. Later Ramsey undertook to translate Wittgenstein’s newly arrived manuscript when many, even Moore, doubted that this was possible. The translation he dictated in Miss Pate’s office – the typescript still exists and was then worked on by Ogden in correspondence with Wittgenstein – it gives the atmosphere of the work very well, though for a textbook (as it became) less Pathos was needed, as Geach pointed out. Perhaps this atmosphere led to Broad’s quip about his “younger colleagues’ (notice not his own) dancing to the highly syncopated pipings of Herr (if you please) Wittgenstein’s flute” but Ramsey’s review written in the year he graduated as a Wrangler is a model of clarity. Syncopation or complexity where necessary was no barrier to him and it remains one of the best introductions to the Tractatus. The young Apostle then went to see his elder brother, recommended by a host of common acquaintances and by the merit of his own translation. He brought an extraordinary quickness of mind and perhaps equally important a most open manner: I quote Frances Partridge’s diary from a few years later: As with many great men (and I am sure he is one) Frank is outwardly simple and unselfconscious. His tall ungainly frame becomes somewhat thicker at the hips; his broad Slavonic face always seems ready to break into a wide smile and his fine rapidly vanishing hair floats in wayward strands around his impressive cranium. He’s intensely musical etc.1

The last point we shall return to: it is of some importance. The qualification “outwardly simple” is well chosen. Mrs Partridge will have been aware of the inner tensions that worried an admiring father when Ramsey was an undergraduate and the emotional crisis that led him to want analysis in 1924 (it cured him, he said, at any rate of the wish to talk about himself).

WITTGENSTEIN AND RAMSEY

21

In discussion Ramsey and Wittgenstein went through the Tractatus together. This issued incidentally in a few extra propositions that were to be added in a second printing if any (there have been scores of them) but haven’t been except in our “philologische Ausgabe” (mine and Schulte’s, the publisher is Suhrkamp). I hope they will be more widely published. However, the discussions were principally devoted to a project that Ramsey describes in a letter to Moore (6.2.1924 – he is explaining his application for a scholarship): I am working on the basis of Wittgenstein’s work, which seems to me to show that Principia is wrong not merely in detail but fundamentally. I have got Russell’s manuscript of the stuff he is inserting into the new edition and it seems to me to take no account of Wittgenstein’s work at all. There is a new Theory of Types without the axiom of reducibility, on which however Russell hasn’t succeeded improving a lot of ordinary mathematics, whose truth, he concludes, remains doubtful. But I have got on Wittgenstein’s principles a new theory of types without any doubtful axioms, which gives all the results of Russell’s one and solves all the contradictions. But Wittgenstein and I think it wrong to suppose with Russell that mathematics is more complicated formal logic (tautologies) and I am trying to make definite the vague idea Wittgenstein has of what it does consist of. If I am successful I think it will illuminate not only mathematics but physics also because a successful theory of mathematics will help one to separate and give a true account of the a priori element in physics. (This certainly exists for “this is not both red and blue” is a priori.)2

(It is interesting that exactly this example occurs in Wittgenstein’s discussions with Schlick and Waismann in 1929 (22 December): it was from the Ramsey discussions, not the Vienna Circle ones that these thoughts took their origin.) Later in the year 1924 Ramsey was to try to induce Wittgenstein to return to England and work there: Keynes would have provided the means, but Wittgenstein declined saying the well of his scientific inspiration had dried up. None the less he seems to have done some work with Ramsey, who kept him in touch with mathematical developments during these years, and let his name be known – Becker mentions it as that of a semi-intuitionist. In the biography of Wittgenstein this is quite an important point, since we otherwise know little of what he was doing intellectually during those years as a schoolmaster. Perhaps it needed Ramsey to provoke this re-direction of attention towards the foundations of mathematics, though the original function of the Tractatus had been to replace the first eleven chapters of Principia. Otherwise, for the early and mid-20’s we only have an indication that he involved himself in biography (perhaps autobiography is meant – a fragment remains) and psychology (we know of his exchange of dreams with the sister already mentioned). When Ramsey came to write the entry on Mathematical Logic (s.v. Mathematics) for the Encyclopaedia Britannica 13th edition his faith in Wittgenstein’s system was still entire, except that he now thought it more plausible to maintain that mathematics was reducible to logic. He constructs his article round the Tractatus and concludes:

22

BRIAN M CGUINNESS

By using the work of Wittgenstein a solution has been constructed…, on which the theory of types is so modified that all need for an axiom of reducibility disappears and mathematics consists entirely of tautologies in Wittgenstein’s sense.3

This entry was published in 1926, but there can be little doubt that it was written before the paper on “The Foundations of Mathematics” read to the London Mathematical Society on 12 November 1925 and published in all collections of his work. To the content of that paper I shall return shortly, only saying that I assume Wittgenstein cannot have known it when he met Ramsey in August 1925. That meeting came about with the all the interlacing of intellectual and personal life characteristic of Bloomsbury. Keynes was newly married to the lovable but eccentric Lydia: indeed these days were to have been their honeymoon. Ramsey was on the eve of his marriage but had to leave his bride and come down to Sussex so that Wittgenstein would have someone to talk to. Geoffrey Keynes and his wife were invited to make up the party and Virginia and Leonard Woolf came over from their house nearby. We know the sort of things that went on from other occasions – Lydia’s boutades taken literally by the Bloomsburyites, Wittgenstein discontented when, instead of his being allowed to prevail in an argument, the subject was blithely changed, Keynes and Wittgenstein talking so fast that no one else could get a word in, then for Ramsey long walks with Wittgenstein, which gave them an opportunity to quarrel about psychoanalysis. This last particular Ramsey recounts in a touching letter to his bartered bride, whom he misses so much. Wittgenstein who must have had half an eye on the possibility of returning to England (he communicated with his friend Eccles in Manchester also) decided to stay in Vienna and take over the building of a house for his sister. He seemed to have broken with Ramsey. Contact was resumed only and in a very chilly manner when Wittgenstein had finished the house and was meeting occasionally with a number of members of the Vienna Circle – Carnap, Waismann, and Feigl in particular. A passage in Ramsey’s paper just mentioned now caught his eye and he dictated a letter, typed by Carnap, which denounced the device by which Ramsey had defined identity, in breach of the Tractatus’s exclusion of that concept. Ramsey, in the end, had not followed Wittgenstein’s principles. A handwritten opening of the letter, “Dear Mr Ramsey”, suggested that he might like to reply to Professor Schlick (for whose thinking in fact Ramsey had not great respect). In a draft reply to Schlick Ramsey explains that he has quarrelled with Wittgenstein though not over this issue. (All the same this did become a contested issue to which Wittgenstein returned in his notes and no doubt his conversations several times.) Such conversations there were to be, because Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge at the beginning of 1929. I have called this a tale of two cities but Vienna was not a place for his work: there he would only be a wealthy amateur. When he did come it was enough for Keynes to tell him that he thought he would find Ramsey worth talking to about logic and other things. And in fact their discussions were a joy:

WITTGENSTEIN AND RAMSEY

23

They’re like some energetic sport and are conducted, I think, in a good spirit. There is something erotic and chivalrous about them. They educate me into a degree of courage in thinking. In science I only like to [quaere only reluctantly] go for a walk on my own.4

The appended sentence is puzzling as written – unless Wittgenstein is thinking of how he otherwise was. Amended (as by Wolfgang Kienzler or myself) it makes more sense but perhaps the most significant point is that Wittgenstein here uses the term “science” (German Wissenschaft) for his own activity and with a positive tone. He had done so in the past, in an enthusiastic letter to Russell of 15.12.1913, and in a significant passage on solipsism: Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life does religion – science – and art arise.5

And his sister echoes this in her reflections on the impossibility of religion, science and ethics being one for them (the family) since religion was missing. Schlick and Frege of course used the word for his and their work, but after his discussions with Ramsey, Wittgenstein no longer did and limited the word to natural science and, with a difference, mathematics. One example from many: My aim is thus other than that of the scientists and my train of thought different from theirs.6

We shall see that Ramsey was partly responsible for this. The topics of the discussions (cut short by Ramsey’s illness and death within a year) are in some cases known to us from papers among the remains of Ramsey edited by Maria Carla Galavotti, others from comments on Ramsey in Wittgenstein’s preliminary or semi-edited notebooks and typescripts. The first twenty or so sections in her book show a number of areas in which Ramsey mulls over, not without criticism of Wittgenstein, problems which appear in the development of a semi-systematic re-writing of the Tractatus such as Waismann was about to begin back in Vienna. Visual space, the nature of meaning, the idea that logic must take care of itself and so on. Later in the selection we find Ramsey talking about the foundations, if any, of physics and mathematics, and above all about the infinite. It seems from later notes of Wittgenstein’s that Ramsey defended an extensional interpretation: I said on one occasion that no extensional infinite existed. Ramsey replied, Can’t one imagine a man living for ever, i.e. simply never dying, and isn’t that extensional infinity? And, to be sure, I can imagine a wheel turning and never stopping. There is a strange difficulty here: it seems to me nonsense to say that there are in a room an infinite number of bodies, as it were by accident. On the other hand I can think in an intentional manner of an infinite law (or an infinite rule) that always produces something new – ad infinitum – but naturally only what a rule can produce, i.e. constructions.7

24

BRIAN M CGUINNESS

The topic recurs in other manuscripts of Wittgenstein’s. Note that “The Infinite” was precisely the topic Wittgenstein chose for the talk actually delivered to the Aristotelian Society in Nottingham in July 1929. Now in fact among Ramsey’s papers there is one in German (with some examples and sentences in English), to which my attention was drawn by Maria-Carla Galavotti and which she entitled “Ist die primäre Zeit unendlich?”, such being its first words. The initial paragraph does indeed appear in the published Philosophische Bemerkungen, as Professor Galavotti remarks, but the remaining paragraphs are drawn from Wittgenstein’s large notebook no. 2 (MS 106), with a few comments or summaries in English and a small number of spelling mistakes not of the usual Wittgensteinian kind. (This point and a good discussion of the content of the paper occur in Wolfgang Kienzler’s Wittgensteins Wende zu seiner Spätphiliosophie 19301932.) This particular selection of Wittgenstein’s remarks does not occur elsewhere, so it is probably not drawn from a prepared document. It seems to me not unlikely that it was dictated to Ramsey as a draft for the Aristotelian Society talk, perhaps for translation. The paper discusses various problems of interest to Wittgenstein and Ramsey at the time (I shall mention one shortly) but ends up (to show its general nature), as follows: Infinite possibility is represented by a variable whose place can be filled in infinitely many ways: and the infinite should not occur in a proposition in any other way.8

At Nottingham Wittgenstein left undiscussed his paper on “Logical Form”, which had been presented in advance and is in fact printed in the Proceedings. Now this paper is also one in which the hand of Ramsey appears. Indeed it is only natural if the paper or papers presented at the Joint Session represented Wittgenstein’s chief preoccupations during the year and hence also his conversations with Ramsey, which were so important to him. This is pre-eminently true of the “Logical Form” paper, which presents, as is well known, a revision of the system of the Tractatus. As Wittgenstein explained to his friends in Vienna, he no longer thought that an elementary proposition was itself confronted with reality. It was now a propositional system that was laid against reality – and this had the consequence not that there were an infinite number of elementary propositions but that there were none, as is indeed said in the paper on the infinite we have just been discussing. Given that this topic is one raised at the very beginning of Ramsey’s contact with Wittgenstein I think there is little doubt that he helped Wittgenstein to solve (sit venia verbi) the problem of colour incompatibility (and more generally that of the synthetic a priori), which had been a trouble since Tractatus 6.3751 and which was a subject of preoccupation in Vienna. The direction of influence between the two thinkers has been a subject of some discussion, Kienzler and Eva Picardi and Rosaria Egidi representing Wittgenstein as making the larger contribution, whereas Ulrich Maier and Mathieu Marion for example think Ramsey taught Wittgenstein to view mathematics in an intuitionist and even finitist way. I cannot enter into all these topics today but it seems to me that influence is not the right word: we might better remember

WITTGENSTEIN AND RAMSEY

25

Gilbert Ryle’s reply when asked whether he had been influenced by Wittgenstein: “I learnt a lot from him.” Now Wittgenstein clearly learnt a lot from Ramsey and came back to philosophy with a knowledge of the thought of Weyl, Brouwer and Hilbert that he would not have had otherwise. But he certainly did not adopt a position near to intuitionism under Ramsey’s influence – Ramsey’s conversion (if such it was) occurred after their meeting in 1925 and Wittgenstein’s enthusiasm for Brouwer did not result from but was the reason for going to the 1928 lecture. It was not a Cambridge product. Ramsey reports in a letter to Fraenkel in 1928 that [in 1924] Wittgenstein did not accept his (Ramsey’s) solution which avoided the need for an axiom of reducibility but rejected all those parts of mathematics that depended on it: “his conclusions were nearly those of the moderate intuitionists. What he now thinks I do not know.” This position of Wittgenstein’s became known (probably through Ramsey) and, as we have seen, Wittgenstein is quoted as a semi-intuitionist alongside Chwistek in Becker’s book on mathematical existence. Least of all did Wittgenstein owe his finitism to Ramsey: in his passages on the matter (taking the line we have seen) Ramsey is always presented as the believer in an actual infinite whom it is important to refute. The general thesis that Ramsey was the chief inspirer of Wittgenstein’s second philosophy seems to me mistaken, unless by the second philosophy is meant that intermediate phase in which a revised dogmatism still seemed possible. The real change came, and this is indicated even by the tribute to Ramsey in the preface to Philosophical Investigations, with the abandonment of the search for the essence of language, which was inspired by Sraffa and by the reading of that least Viennese of figures, Spengler, or, in other words, with the move away from dogmatism, as Wittgenstein called it in his conversation with Waismann in December 1930. Looking back, in the rough notebook (Ms 157b) used when he was making a determined effort to write the definitive account of his changed view (his 1936-37 Ms 142, most of which survives in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations), Wittgenstein says that the idea of the family [i.e. family resemblance, by inference and by other references that of Spengler] and [the realization that] understanding was not a pneumatic process were two axe strokes against [his previous doctrine – of the crystal clarity of logic in itself]. Sraffa had shown him that he had to accept as a sign something for which he could not give the rules and grammar. From this point of view it is not surprising that in the original version of his well known list of influences on himself Wittgenstein includes just four – Frege and Russell, Spengler and Sraffa – the muses respectively of his first and of his later philosophy. Ramsey is not even added later (as Hertz, Kraus and others are). Ramsey indeed was (almost) the enemy, though no doubt the enemy within – note that one of Ramsey’s last papers shows that he thinks philosophy consists of definitions, precisely what Wittgenstein wanted to get away from. Ramsey’s

26

BRIAN M CGUINNESS

contribution perhaps consisted in showing the difficulties that arose from Wittgenstein’s earlier position. Of course we do not know how Ramsey would have developed had he lived, nor how this would have affected Wittgenstein. I suspect that Ramsey did not have the willpower to control Wittgenstein nor Wittgenstein the wit to convince Ramsey. Their paths would probably have diverged in any case. I will give a few instances of the passages where Wittgenstein, characteristically unsparing, anticipates this in describing this difference between Ramsey and himself on philosophical matters. They should be set against an awareness of the love and concern that Frances Partridge saw when he accompanied her to Ramsey’s deathbed. Ramsey’s death roughly coincided with Wittgenstein’s gradually distancing himself from Bloomsbury and the circle of the Apostles, to which he had formally returned in 1929 (a dinner was held on the occasion). For a while he interested himself in the literary, dramatic and musical activities of the young, above all the privileged young – “all those Wykehamists”, as Leavis scornfully described them (Wittgenstein’s own phrase was “all those Julian Bells”). He took Dadie Rylands round the College garden explaining how Shakespeare should be produced. He analysed the symbols in the poems of William Empson’s circle. He criticized John Hare’s (the later Lord Listowel’s) singing and commented on the paintings of Julian Trevelyan. Something – more than one thing probably – changed him. His views were perhaps not given the attention they deserved. Rylands smiled at the advice that was given, Julian Bell wrote a poetic epistle, addressed to Braithwaite, protesting against the cultural hegemony claimed by Wittgenstein. John Cornford’s scorn for his teachers may have been directed against, for it was certainly resented by, Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein began to find friends and disciples in less privileged and more earnest circles, who were primarily intent on personal improvement: King, Lee and Townsend, who have published their notes on his lectures; the circle round Skinner; and particularly Drury, Smythies and Rhees, who remained close to him till the end of his life. Each group is worthy of description, but none is remotely to be thought of in connexion with Bloomsbury. They were prepared, however, for the difficult task of discipleship: it meant that they had to get the essential things right and yet be prepared to disagree with Wittgenstein: above all they could not play with ideas, or indeed with much else. He found also friends of his own age and on his own level and, by a social law that I have observed operate at Oxford, these tended to be foreigners who (more than was necessary but not more than was natural) felt themselves outside the cosy world of the colleges. Piccoli, the professor of Italian, was one example. But the chief figure of this kind was undoubtedly Sraffa and here Wittgenstein was confronted with willpower almost equal to his own. If Sraffa made him feel like a tree stripped of its branches, Sraffa in the end found their conversations too much – “I won’t be bullied by you, Wittgenstein”, Smythies (who, you might

WITTGENSTEIN AND RAMSEY

27

say, had been bullied by both) heard him say. Sraffa resembled Wittgenstein even in some of the methods and aims of his scientific work. He too could use their common friends Ramsey and Alister Watson to help him with the mathematics he needed, but he took strictly what he needed from them. And I am struck by a summary judgement of Amartya Sen9: [Sraffa’s] later work did not take the form of finding different answers to the standard questions in mainstream economics, but that of altering – and in some ways broadening – the nature of the inquiries in which mainstream economics was engaged.

Sen adds that it would be surprising if Sraffa had not been influenced by his own philosophical position but had stayed within “the rather limited boundaries of positivist or representational reasoning commonly invoked in contemporary mainstream economics.” Instead he addressed (according to Sen) foundational economic issues of general social and political interest (some of which have been discussed for over two hundred years). Sen has some valuable suggestions for the influence of Sraffa’s philosophical position on Wittgenstein, but I will not go into those here. I want instead to quote one Cambridge contemporary who felt that Wittgenstein also went, or wanted to go, outside the recognized borders of his subject. No great figure but a thoughtful friend of the Bloomsbury group, Sydney Waterlow, wrote to Moore as follows: [On reading Ramsey] contrast between his quite extraordinary powers and his immense vitality on the one hand and on the other the poverty of his Weltanschauung. Wrong that there should be such a contrast; something has gone terribly wrong. His drift towards stating everything in “pragmatic” terms could not, however arguable, put the wrong right. [Ought we to accept only a limited circle of beliefs that are not nonsense] My own belief is that this simply cannot be the case and nothing that a Ramsey can say to the contrary can affect me in the least. For one thing there is a cocksureness in his attitude which I feel to be cosmically inappropriate. A Russell or a Keynes can never grow out of that pertness – there is no principle of growth in them – but Ramsey is so good that he might have if he had lived. [The unsatisfactoriness of Principia Ethica] But what is satisfactory I haven’t the faintest idea. I rather think Wittgenstein knows and I believe one has got to find out.10

How Moore replied we do not know. He will not have mocked Waterlow as Virginia Woolf does in her diaries, where, however, she tells us something about him that brings him into connexion with Wittgenstein: Waterlow at this time had discovered the other inspirer of Wittgenstein’s Wende, Spengler (the word Weltanschauung betrays it), and this had changed the world for him. It is true the Wende took Wittgenstein in directions not envisaged by Spengler, Waterlow, or followers of Wittgenstein such as Paul Engelmann, but that his tendency was to break the boundaries, to change the donne is undeniable. It is far from clear that Ramsey would have wanted any such thing.

28

BRIAN M CGUINNESS

N OTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

Frances Partridge, Memories, Gollancz 1981 p.129. CUL: Papers of G.E. Moore (letter from F.P. Ramsey 6.2.1924). Encyclopaedia Britannica 13th edition (New Volume 2, p.831). Wittgenstein Papers 105 4 15 Feb.1929. Ich habe sehr genußreiche Diskussionen mit Ramsey über Logik etc. Sie haben etwas von einem kräftigen Sport und sind glaube ich in einem guten Geist geführt. Es ist etwas Erotisches und Ritterliches darin. Ich werde dabei auch zu einem gewissen Mut im Denken erzogen. Es kann mir beinahe nichts Angenehmeres geschehen als wenn mir jemand meine Gedanken gleichsam aus dem Mund nimmt und sie gleichsam im Freien aufrollt. Natürlich ist alles das mit viel Eitelkeit gemischt, aber es ist nicht pure Eitelkeit. Ich gehe in der Wissenschaft nur gern [quaere nur ungern or nicht gern] allein spazieren. 5. Noteboooks 1914-1916 p.79 1.8.1916. Nur aus dem Bewußtsein der Einzigkeit meines Lebens entspringt Religion – Wissenschaft – und Kunst. 6. Wittgenstein papers 109 207 6 Nov.1930. Mein Ziel ist also ein anderes als das der Wissenschaftler und meine Denkbewegung von der ihrigen verschieden. 7. Wittgenstein Papers 105 23 (February 1929). Ich sagte einmal es gäbe keine extensionale Unendlichkeit. Ramsey sagt darauf kann man sich nicht vorstellen daß ein Mensch ewig lebt d.h. einfach nie stirbt, und ist das nicht extensionale Unendlichkeit? Ich kann mir doch gewiß denken daß ein Rad sich dreht und nie stehenbleibt. Hier liegt eine merkwürdige Schwierigkeit: Es scheint mir unsinnig zu sagen daß in einem Raum unendlich viele Körper sind gleichsam als etwas Zufälliges. Dagegen kann ich mir ja intentional ein unendliches Gesetz denken (oder eine unendliche Regel) durch die immer neues produziert wird – ad infinitum – aber natürlich nur was eine Regel produzieren kann, nämlich Konstruktionen. 8. Ramsey Papers 004-23-01. Die unendliche Möglichkeit ist durch eine Variable vertreten die eine unbegrenzte Möglichkeit der Besetzung hat: und auf andere Art darf das Unendliche nicht im Satz vorkommen. 9. Amartya Sen “Piero Sraffa: a student’s perspective”, Atti dei convegni Lincei, vol. 200, Rome 2004, pp.23-60. 10. CUL: Papers of G.E. Moore (letters from Sydney Waterlow 6 & 23 Jul. 1931).

Dipartimento di filosofia e scienze sociali Università degli studi di Siena Via Roma 47 53100 Siena Italy [email protected]