James Glover

October 15, 2025 until April 14, 2026

Affiliation: University of Oxford

Research for a study about:

Ramsey and Carnap, 1928-1929

Abstract:

On 10 December 1929, Frank Ramsey wrote to Moritz Schlick apologising for delaying a long-promised review of Carnap’s Aufbau: ‘I am very sorry and will do it when I next have leisure. At the moment I am in bed with a very severe attack of jaundice…’. Forty days later, on 19 January 1930, Ramsey died, leaving neither review nor draft. My project at the IVC attempts to reconstruct Ramsey’s reception of Carnap’s ideas from certain little-discussed notes and drafts. These include a discussion of how verification might work in ‘the primary world’ and in relation to time; an argument against Carnap’s conception of verification; an argument for thinking Carnap’s view entails an objectionable solipsism; and various other notes on ‘the given’, constructions therefrom, and the nature of the external world. The project will undertake to (i) organize and interpret these materials, (ii) offer philosophical evaluation of the arguments presented, and (iii) situate them in relation to Ramsey’s contemporaneous metaphysics and philosophy of science. It will also undertake to interpret the manuscript paper ‘Philosophy’ (1929) and its drafts as being directly and critically engaged with the Aufbau’s meta-philosophy—especially the conception of philosophy as a ‘system of definitions’. Besides these main goals, the project will also scrutinise other exchanges between Ramsey and the Vienna Circle: the correspondence with Schlick, and the Circle’s discussions of Ramsey’s logicism and theory of identity, for example.

Lecture

Ramsey's Theories (1929) 

Philosophy of Science Colloquium 

Date: November 20, 2025 

Time: 4.45 pm -6.15 pm CET

Venue for all talks: Lecture Hall 2i, NIG Universitätsstraße 7, 2nd floor, NIG/ Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna

Abstract:

My talk concerns Frank Ramsey’s theory of theories. The literature on his paper ‘Theories’ (1929) has tended to argue that the primary-secondary systems model of theories that it presents is (i) such that ‘the primary’ refers to what is given in experience while the ‘secondary’ refers to theoretical concepts that are not so given, and (ii) anti-reductionist about those theoretical concepts. I show instead that the primary-secondary systems model is (i) defined along explanatory lines (though it may derivatively apply to the distinction between what is given and what is not) and (ii) reductionist about theoretical concepts. Along the way, I trace some seldom-noted influences on the paper from Wittgenstein, Hilbert, Weyl, and Carnap. I then connect Ramsey’s theory of theories to his late epistemological and meta-philosophical views, and argue that they exhibit an interesting degree of agreement with those set out in Carnap’s Aufbau. I conclude that Ramsey’s late views spanning the philosophy of science, epistemology and meta-philosophy were more continuous with the scientific philosophy of the Vienna Circle than has been appreciated.