Ramsey and the Vienna Circle 10

M ARIA C ARLA G ALAVOTTI

RAMSEY’S “NOTE ON TIME”

F OREWORD Ramsey’s “Note on Time”, published here for the first time, belongs to the Ramsey Collection, held at the Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh as part of the “Archives for Scientific Philosophy in the Twentieth Century”. Before we turn to Ramsey’s text, a few remarks on the Ramsey Collection are appropriate. The collection includes about 120 documents (for the most part manuscripts), contained in seven boxes, for a total of roughly 1500 pages. A number of them are manuscript versions of articles which appeared in print during Ramsey’s lifetime, or in the three collections The Foundations of Mathematics edited by Richard Bevan Braithwaite in 1931, and Foundations (1978) and Philosophical Papers (1990), both edited by Hugh Mellor – all of which cover to a large extent the same material. From 1989 on, a remarkable number of manuscripts belonging to the Ramsey Collection were published, like the articles “Principles of Finitist Mathematics”, edited by Ulrich Majer for the History of Philosophy Quarterly, 1989, and “Weight or the Value of Knowledge”, published with a “Preamble” by Nils-Eric Sahlin in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1990. In addition, the volume On Truth, edited by Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer, appeared in 1991, containing the material written by Ramsey between 1927 and 1929 as part of a planned book, meant to bear the title On Truth and Probability, of which there are a number of tables of contents in the Collection. The volume On Truth includes two more papers belonging to the Ramsey Collection, namely “The Nature of Propositions”, read at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club in 1921, and “Induction: Keynes and Wittgenstein”, read to the “Apostles” in 1922, plus the note “The ‘Long’ and the ‘Short’ of it or a Failure of Logic”, which is a slightly different version of the article “Achilles and the Tortoise”, published in The Forum in 1927 – and more recently republished in volume X of Bertrand Russell’s Collected Papers 1. One more collection of Ramsey’s papers, edited by myself under the title Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics, was published in 1991. The collection contains the transcription of 86 documents of the Ramsey Collection, most of which appeared there in print for the first time. The papers cover a wide range of topics: from meaning to identity, theories, hypothetical propositions and 155 M. C. Galavotti (ed.), Cambridge and Vienna: Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, 155–165. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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probability. Various topics on the foundations of mathematics, such as formalism, intuitionism and finitism are also covered. In addition, the volume includes eight papers read to the Apostles between 1921 and 1925, a letter from Wittgenstein to Ramsey on identity dated 1927, and two drafts of Ramsey’s reply. The note on time which is published here does not appear in Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics. The Ramsey Collection still comprises a group of unpublished papers, including various technical writings focused on the decision problem (the so-called Entscheidungsproblem) and commentaries on such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Johnson, Moore, Bradley, Bosanquet, Keynes, Russell, Peirce, Hilbert, Bernays, Brower, Skolem, Weyl, and many others, including Freud. Ramsey’s early papers on political and philosophical topics, contained in three notebooks written when he was an undergraduate, are also of interest. On their own, these papers would make for a publication that would not only be a testimonial of Ramsey’s extraordinary precocity and brilliance, but also a historical document reflecting the social and cultural atmosphere of his time. The Ramsey Collection has a few more treasures to be disclosed to researchers of good will. R AMSEY ’ S MANUSCRIPT The text reported hereafter is a transcription of Ramsey’s “Note on Time”. This represents manuscript 002.07.02 of the Ramsey Collection, Archives for Scientific Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Hillman Library, Pittsburgh, here quoted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. The editing has been done in such a way as to preserve as much as possible of the original text: words or passages which appear struck out in the manuscript have been restored and reported in footnotes. The editor’s insertions throughout the text have been put in square brackets. As editor of this note, I warmly thank the late Margaret Paul, Ramsey’s sister, for her help in deciphering a few words of the manuscript during a visit I paid her in Oxford in summer 1994. Here follows Ramsey’s text: N.B. This comes in connexion with Broad’s doctrine that no prop[osition] about the future is true or false. Note on Time 2

Dr. Broad in Scientific Thought, the late McTaggart in The Nature of Existence vol II, and Mr. Dunne in An Experiment with Time have all found substantially the same difficulty in the fact that every event has (at different times) the three incompatible characteristics of pastness, presentness and futurity, and further that events change with respect to these characteristics from being future to being present and from being present to being past. Ordinary change is a change of objects in time, but this appears to be a change of time itself. To solve this difficulty3 Mr. Dunne has suggested a second time series, for4 our ordinary time series to change in, and a third for this second to change in and so on ad

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infinitum; Dr. McTaggart has declared that time is unreal and Dr. Broad has tried to save its reality by an elaborate theory. I should like, however, to suggest that there is no need for any such heroic solution since the initial difficulty5 is simply a mistake. What do people mean by “present”, “past” and “future”? By “the present time” a man means the time at which he is speaking, by calling an event present he means that it is at that time, or in other words that it is simultaneous with his speech, and past and future are defined as meaning respectively before and after the present. From this it is clear that the word “present” has a different meaning at every time at which it is used. When I used it yesterday, I meant6 what I now call yesterday; when I use it now I mean7 to-day. In this respect it is exactly like the word “mine” 8; which has a different meaning for every person who uses it. Every age or time calls itself the present, earlier ages9 past, later ages future. This is no more mysterious or difficult, than that every man calls himself I; the person he is talking to you and other people he. When a man10 changes from being I to being you in a conversation, this is not a change in his nature, but in what he is called. Just so events do not change their temporal relations, and then11 change from present to past is not a change in them at all, but merely in what we call them. (It is clear that this can occur; the number two cannot change but its name can change from duo to deux or two.) Events do not become present, it is the word “present” which comes to mean them; what changes is not the event but the meaning of the word. But you will say “the present” never changes in meaning, it always means “the time at which it is used”. But this is not its meaning, it is the law by which its meaning is on each occasion determined. Just so “I” means the speaker. But it does not mean that it always has the same meaning; if one man says “I did”, the other “I didn’t”, they are not contradicting one another, they mean different things and what each means can be determined from the rule that “I” means the speaker. We see that the fact might be better expressed by saying on each occasion on which it is used, “the present” means the time at which it is used, i.e. on each occasion it means something different. It is worth considering a little further how the mistake arises; in part it may be due to this ambiguity of the word present, but more, I think, to a source of confusion which arises when we try to imagine a temporal series of events. One way of doing this is to go through the events one after another in the order in which they happened, as when one rehearses a tune in one’s mind. But this method is often unsatisfactory as we want to have all the events in our mind at once in order better to see their relations, we then imagine them spread out before us along a line like the notes in a score. The defect of this method is that their time order is replaced by a space order, which does not share its “sense”; the difference between “before” and ”after” is lost. To overcome this we are apt to imagine each of the events spread out before us being lit up in turn by the bull’s eye lantern of presentness, and take presentness to be a real quality possessed by each event in turn12 as it moves down the series. 13We must either follow Mr. Dunne by taking this motion of presentness as being in another time system, or else we get landed in the fearful difficulty of each event having incompatible characteristics. Dr. Broad proposes to get over this by declaring the future non-existent, so that no event is ever future; on this view it is true that events do not have incompatible characteristics, but certain propositions seem still to be both true and false. e.g. [“] there is in the universe no such thing as the death of Queen Anne [”] was true up to 1714, false thereafter and the difficulty is not really removed. Bur clearly the whole difficulty is a mistake; the events are really in temporal order one before the other; each is present to or simultaneous with itself, future to the preceding

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ones past to the subsequent. The moving present is really the series of events themselves; only when the temporal series is replaced in imagination by a spatial series, do we try to restore its temporal quality by introducing presentness from outside. This is not to say that we cannot legitimately represent a temporal series by a spatial one, provided we are prepared to keep to it to allow (say) [“] to the left of [”] to stand by convention for [“] before [”] and not attempt simultaneously an imaginative realisation of the temporal relationship.

E DITOR ’ S COMMENTS ON R AMSEY ’ S NOTE Ramsey’s note features his particular way of addressing philosophical problems. On reading it through, one can see Ramsey’s intellect at work, that intellect that John Maynard Keynes in his obituary of Ramsey called “amazing” because of its powers and “easy efficiency” 14, and Dora Carrington in a letter to Lytton Strachey of 1923 depicted as so impressive as to deserve the title of “devastating” 15. When applied to Ramsey’s way of addressing philosophical problems, Carrington’s characterization is apt, for Ramsey literally jumps into the problem at hand and tries to dissolve it. In this enterprise, he is guided by a genuinely pragmatical approach, which leads him to look at problems from our perspective as human beings, acting according to our beliefs. This attitude is reflected by Keynes’ claim that “Ramsey reminds one of Hume more than anyone else, particularly in his common sense and a sort of hard-headed practicality towards the whole business” 16. It is precisely with such “hard-headed practicality” that Ramsey addresses the problem of time. Ramsey’s pages bear a strong resemblance to the second part of Chapter V: “Judgment and time [or? Time and the mind]” of On Truth. On the basis of this and other clues, the note (which is not dated) was probably written around 1928. Reference to McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence and Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, both published in 1927, obviously indicate that the note cannot have been written earlier. A further clue comes from Supplementary volume VIII of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society of 1928, collecting the proceedings of a symposium on “Time and Change”, with papers by J. Macmurray, Richard Bevan Braithwaite and Charlie Dunbar Broad. Ramsey’s note could be somehow related to that; he might have written it during or after the session of the Aristotelian Society, or before it, since there was the habit of circulating papers beforehand. Afterwards, he could have drawn from such notes the material for the chapter of the book he was writing. Of the three authors commented upon by Ramsey in his note, Dunne is likely to be almost unknown to the present day philosophical public. John William Dunne (1875-1949) is described as an “inventor and philosopher” in The Dictionary of National Biography (Missing Persons), 1993 Edition 17. Son of a general, he was born and brought up in South Africa, became an aeronautical engineer, and in that capacity designed a revolutionary type of monoplane with swept-back wings and no tail. The War Office employed him, with a view to the production of a prototype, but in the end his model was not accepted. His first

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book was a guide to dry-fly fishing (Sunshine and the Dry-Fly, London 1924). He won renown with the book mentioned by Ramsey, namely An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927 (third revised edition 1934), which became a best-seller, and was reprinted many times over a period of about fifty years. Other books by Dunne are The Serial Universe (London, 1934), meant as a continuation of An Experiment with Time; The New Immortality (London, 1938), Nothing Dies (London, 1940), Intrusions? (Published posthumously: London, 1955). An Experiment with Time attracted the attention of various writers, including John Boynton Priestley and Herbert George Wells, who praised Dunne in their writings and acknowledged his influence. Priestley, a well known novelist and playwright, devoted a chapter of his book Man and Time to Dunne’s “serialism”, and based on it his play Time and the Conways (1937). Dunne’s serialism originated from the consideration that certain dreams seem to foreshadow future experiences. Dunne called this phenomenon “displacement of time”, and set about explaining it in a somewhat positivistic spirit. He tried to transmit to his readers a truly experimental attitude, suggesting that they keep pad and pencil on their bedside table, to be able to record dreams immediately on awakening. In this way, they would eventually be in a position to experience the phenomenon in question, and be ready to appreciate his theory of time, meant to account for precognitive dreams. Dunne’s influence on his readers was such that talk of “Dunne’s dreams” became commonplace: probably a favourite topic of conversation at parties, but there must have been more to it, since the third edition of An Experiment with Time includes an Appendix with an extract from a letter of Arthur Eddington, which should count as evidence that the latter took Dunne’s theory of time quite seriously18. For the curious reader’s benefit, the gist of Dunne’s theory is a distinction between “Time length” and “Time motion”. While reaffirming the traditional distinction between past, present and future with respect to time length, Dunne claimed that time motion is to be seen as moving along time length. He then added that “motion in time must be timeable”, because if motion were everywhere in time length, it would not be moving at all. Dunne observed that in order to set the timing of time movement, another time is required, so the Time which times such movement needs to be a different Time, say Time2. In turn, the moving of Time2 requires a Time3 to be timeable, and so on. Accordingly, time change gives rise to a hierarchy of time series, which implies an “apparent series to infinity”19. This serial notion of time requires an analogous serialism with regard to observers, so that there is an Observer1 in Time1, an Observer2 in Time2 and so on. Dunne was not at all concerned by the infinite regress postulated by his theory. In his “Replies to critics”, published in the third edition of An Experiment with Time, he says that philosophers are wrongly suspicious of infinite regress, because “infinite regress is, after all, the proper and valid description of the mind’s relation to its objective universe” 20. By means of the conceptual machinery of serial time Dunne tried to explain precognitive dreams as follows. Take an Observer1 in Time1, and an Observer2 in

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Time2. Observer1 is immersed in a three-dimensional space, where he lives and makes experiences which are observed by Observer2. The latter, however, is located in four-dimensional Time2, where not only the past, but also the future are open to him. What happens is that while Observer1 is awake, he captures the attention of Observer2 who basically just registers the experiences of Observer1, but when the latter is asleep Observer2 is free to range freely between past and future, and occasionally this brings about precognitive dreams. Dunne’s theory is much more complex than described here, and includes a theory of the relationship between intelligence and the brain, consciousness and unconsciousness, mortality and immortality – for Dunne we are immortal beings, because death in Time1 does not involve death at Time221. Needless to say, Dunne’s theory is open to serious objections. For instance, one might demur that it presupposes a deterministic, pre-determined world since, if Observer2 can see the future, there has to be something out there to be seen. Well aware of this possible objection, Dunne anticipated an answer, ending up with a profession of idealism, according to which it is mere materialism to insist upon a physical world existing independently of observers. But this is at odds with other pieces of his theory, such as the tenet that Observer1 is in a position to educate higher order observers to interpret what they observe, precisely because the time and space constraints of Observer1 enable him to focus and sharpen his attention, so as to form a solid experience22. As already said, there is much more to Dunne’s theory of time; so much that it seems advisable to stop here. The other thinkers addressed by Ramsey do not need much presentation. John (McTaggart Ellis) McTaggart (1866-1925) was a well known British idealist, author of Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (1896) and Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901). The book mentioned by Ramsey, namely The Nature of Existence, was published in 1927. Concerning time, in 1908 McTaggart had already published a famous article in Mind, called “The Unreality of Time”, where he spelled out an argument, which was to become very influential, to the effect that there is no such thing as time. In a nutshell, McTaggart’s argument goes as follows. Events can be ordered in time in two different ways, namely according to a system of tenses or according to a system of dates. In the first case, the description of events includes mention of past, present and future, and gives rise to what he calls an A-series. In the second case, the description of events is not obtained by reference to pastness, presentness and futurity, being rather rendered by means of relations such as “earlier than”, “later than”, “simultaneous with”; in which case we have a B-series. McTaggart claimed that the notion of A-series is essential to the characterization of time, because time involves change and only A-series involve change, whereas B-series are immutable. Having argued thus, McTaggart went on to claim that the notion of A-series is contradictory, because the properties characterizing such series – namely presentness, pastness and futurity – are incompatible with one another, for the simple reason that the same event would be past, present and future. He then concludes that, the A-series being contradictory, time, which is based upon it, is unreal.

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Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887-1971) succeeded McTaggart as Fellow in Moral Science at Trinity in 1923. He wrote a number of influential books, such as Scientific Thought (1923), The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925), Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930) and Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (1933). Broad opted for a “tensed” theory of time, which takes the notion of “absolute becoming” as an irreducible feature of the world. Within such a theory, a pivotal role was assigned to “presentness”, seen as moving along the time series in a fixed relation. Contextually, Broad denied the existence of the future, on the basis of the consideration that judgments about the past and present can be said to be true or false, whereas the same does not hold for judgments about the future. To illustrate his view Broad discussed McTaggart’s example, also mentioned by Ramsey. In Broad’s words: “Let us take M’Taggart’s example of the death of Queen Anne, as an event which is supposed to combine the incompatible characteristics of pastness, presentness, and futurity. In the first place, we may say at once that, on our view, futurity is not and never has been literally a characteristic of the event which is characterised as the death of Queen Anne. Before Anne died there was no such thing as Anne’s death, and ‘nothing’ can have no characteristics”23. Against these authors, Ramsey takes an utterly original position, arguing that to associate time with the passage from future, to present, to past, is mistaken. In fact, if it is admitted that events change in this way, it is implied that pastness, presentness and futurity are characteristics of events, but this eventually leads to the contradiction that the same event would possess all of them, and further that events change when passing from being future to being present, and from being present to being past. On the contrary, Ramsey holds that “presentness” just means the time at which one is speaking, exactly as when using “now” one means that an event is “simultaneous with his speech” 24. Ramsey compares “the present” to other indexical terms, like “I” and “you”, that are assigned a meaning by a rule which fixes their meaning depending on the context in which they occur. Exactly as “I” means the speaker in a given situation, “‘the present’ means the time at which it is used”, and therefore means something different on every occasion. As claimed in On Truth, “presentness is not a quality at all, any more than ‘you-ness’ is a quality” 25. Having made this clear, Ramsey goes on to suggest that in order to represent time we imagine events “spread out before us along a line, replacing the time order by a space order” 26. Then a “sense” is imposed on the series from the outside by a convention, by which we agree that “to the left of” stands for “before”. Contrary to Broad, Ramsey regards the “moving present” as being “really the series of events themselves”, rather than a quality possessed by “each event in turn as it moves down the series” 27. Ramsey deems the whole idea of the A and B-series, as well as the claim that time is unreal, sheer “nonsense”. Ramsey’s denial that pastness, presentness and futurity are qualities of events and that change is something that happens to events having these qualities, leads immediately to a dissolution of the whole of McTaggart’s argument. As Ramsey puts it: “There is no more mystery in an

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event being both ‘present’ (when mentioned at one time) and ‘past’ (when mentioned at another) than in a man being both ‘I’ (when spoken of by one man (himself) and ‘you’ (when spoken to by another). To infer that the time relationship is unreal is like concluding that the relationship of conversation must be unreal because in it people have the incompatible characteristics of Iness and youness” 28. He concludes that “Really, the whole idea is so silly that it is hard to see what it makes it plausible” 29. But Ramsey does not stop here. He rather makes an attempt to analyse how the mistake affecting McTaggart’s theory arose, and this is the most original aspect of his account30. According to Ramsey, McTaggart’s mistake lies with the fact that he represents time series in two different ways at the same time, and then mixes them up when they should be kept separate. In Ramsey’s words: “the whole difficulty comes from combining two disparate modes of representation” 31. The first of such ways consists in imagining a temporal series of events, put one after the other in order, as “when one rehearses a tune in one’s mind”. The other occurs when we have all the events “in our mind at once”, and we “imagine them spread out before us along a line like the notes in a score”. In the second case, however, the difference between “before” and “after” is lost, and in order to restore it “we are apt to imagine each of the events spread out before us being lit up in turn by the bull’s eye lantern of presentness, and take presentness to be a real quality possessed by each event in turn as it moves down the series” 32. At that point, one has either to invent another time series to account for the motion of presentness, as done by Dunne, or “to adopt the less logical hypotheses of McTaggart or Broad” 33. However – Ramsey claims – there is no need for such tricks, once the mistake has been recognised. Ramsey’s account of time bears a strong resemblance to that of Richard Braithwaite. In the paper belonging to the symposium “Time and Change”, Braithwaite starts from an analysis of the notion of “presentness”, which is very close to that put forward by Ramsey, and reaches a similar conclusion. After embracing what he calls a “relational view of the present, past and future” he claims that “our knowledge of time is derived not from some subtle philosophy, but from direct experience”, adding that his “contention is that the reality of time and change necessitate no particular philosophy; any metaphysic is compatible with them except one (like McTaggart’s) which denies their reality”. Braithwaite’s conclusion is that “there is no paradox or antinomy or riddle or logical problem about time” 34 and his paper ends with the claim that “As philosophers we must take time seriously, but not too seriously” 35. The literature on time has been growing constantly since Ramsey’s times, and has become so conspicuous as to be beyond our reach. Therefore, no attempt will be made to compare Ramsey’s position with that of other authors who have contributed to the literature. Rather, this commentary will end with some remarks meant to explore the connections between Ramsey’s note and the remainder of his published papers. There are hardly any references to time in the bulk of papers published in The Foundations of Mathematics and Philosophical

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Papers, except for “General Propositions and Causality”, dated 1929, in which the asymmetry between past, present and future is discussed, and related to the asymmetry of the relation of cause and effect. In this connection, Ramsey claims that “It seems to be a fundamental fact, and widely agreed upon, that the future is due to the present, or more mildly, is affected by the present, but the past is not” 36, to which he adds that “it is not clear and, if we try to make it clear, it turns into nonsense or a definition”. Then, Ramsey spells out his solution to the problem of accounting for the asymmetry in question, which amounts to the following: “What is true is this, that any present volition of ours is (for us) irrelevant to any past event. To another (or to ourselves in the future) it can serve as a sign of the past, but to us now what we do affects only the probability of the future. This seems to me the root of the matter; that I cannot affect the past, is a way of saying something quite clearly true about my degrees of belief ” 37. Ramsey seems to be willing to derive the direction of time from the direction of the causal relation. Like the causal relation, which Ramsey construes as rooted in our being agents, time is a component of our nature as human beings, acting on the basis of beliefs. Indeed, in one of the notes published in the collection Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics, Ramsey held that time is an essential component of belief, and maintains that “belief presupposes time” 38. The volume Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics contains a number of references to time. Albeit fragmentary, they suggest that at least part of the importance ascribed by Ramsey to the notion of time is connected with defining what is meant by “subject”, and that time is seen as a component of consciousness, judgment and belief. In the note “Refutation of solipsism” we read that “Experience has essential a subject unless it is timeless; ‘now’ is the subject which knows about itself ” 39; and in the note “The subject”, Ramsey claims that “Now is a subject, which knows about itself. To deny the subject means to have only solipsism of the present moment, and indeed is not possible: e.g. a smell would be a one term fact; or could we divide it? Nowness is relational, in fact it is self identity” 40. The preceding remarks lead us to Ramsey’s conception of such topics as the subject, the self, self-identity, and the like. Once more, a discussion of such topics is left to more competent scholars. As the editor of Ramsey’s “Note on Time”, let me express the hope that his paper, together with the above commentary, will be of some use to all those interested in his extraordinary personality.

N OTES 1. 2.

See Russell (1996), Appendix II, pp. 587-91. The note “The “Long” and the “Short” of it or a Failure of Logic” had already appeared in American Philosophical Quarterly, 24 (1987), pp. 357-9. [Struck out:] Some, e.g.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35 . 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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[Struck out:] the writers referred to have proposed different ([struck out:] made, very, various proposals) suggestions. [Struck out:] the first. [Struck out:] of all these philosophers. [Struck out:] that time; it contemporary with. [Struck out:] this time; contemporary with. [Struck out:] (and “now” is like “I”). [Struck out:] the preceding it calls the. [Struck out:] people. [Struck out:] when they become past. [Struck out:] possesses. [Struck out:] The notion of presentness. Keynes (1933, 1951), p. 240. “We left fortunately before his devastating intellect began, as I expect it did, to wreck the party” writes Carrington (1970, 1979, p. 256). Keynes (1933, 1951), p. 339. See p. 197. Dunne (1927, 1934), p. 215. Dunne (1927, 1934), p. 133. Ibid., p. 197. This is the topic of Dunne’s books The New Immortality (1938) and Nothing Dies (1940). For more on Dunne’s theory, the reader is referred to his books, or to Priestley (1964), Chapter 10. Broad (1923), pp. 78-80. Ramsey (1991a), p. 74. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 75. See the above “Note on Time”. Ramsey (1991a), p. 74; (parentheses in the quotation like in the original). Ibid., pp. 74-5. The originality of Ramsey’s account in this connection was pointed out to me by Jenann Ismael of the University of Arizona, whom I warmly thank for her cooperation. Ramsey (1991a), p. 75. See Ramsey’s “Note on Time”. Ramsey (1991a), p. 75. Braithwaite (1928), p. 172. Ibid., p. 174. Ramsey (1990), p. 157. Ibid., pp. 157-8. See “((What are the arguments against realism?))”, in Ramsey (1991b), p. 70. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 69.

R EFERENCES Braithwaite, Richard Bevan (1928), “Time and Change”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume VIII, pp. 175-88. Broad, Charlie Dunbar (1923), Scientific Thought, London: Kegan Paul. Broad, Charlie Dunbar (1927), The Nature of Existence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted 1968. Carrington, Dora (1970), Letters and Extracts from her Diaries, ed. by David Garnett, London: Jonathan Cape. Reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Dunne, John William (1927), An Experiment with Time, London: Faber and Faber. Third edition 1934.

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Keynes, John Maynard (1933), Essays in Biography, London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Reprinted 1951. McTaggart, John (1908), “The Unreality of Time”, Mind, new series 68, pp. 457-74. McTaggart, John (1927), The Nature of Existence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Priestley, John Boynton (1964), Man and Time, London: Aldus Books. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, (1931), The Foundations of Mathematics, ed. by Richard Bevan Braithwaite, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton (1978), Foundations, ed. by Hugh Mellor, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton (1990), Philosophical Papers, ed. by Hugh Mellor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton (1991a), On Truth, ed. by Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer, DordrechtBoston: Kluwer. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton (1991b), Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics, ed. by Maria Carla Galavotti, Naples: Bibliopolis. Russell, Bertrand (1996), Collected Papers, vol. X: A Fresh Look at Empiricism 1927-42, ed. by John G. Slater, London-New York: Routledge.

Department of Philosophy University of Bologna Via Zamboni 38 40126 Bologna Italy [email protected]