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May 10, 2026

This article. published in Philosophy 70 (1995), 243-62 and reproduced here by permission of the Editor, is derived from (but not a transcript of) ‘Better than the Stars’, my 1978 radio portrait of F. P. Ramsey, streamable from http://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/20145. Page numbers after quotations from Ramsey refer to F. P. Ramsey: Philosophical Papers, edited by D. H. Mellor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cambridge Philosophers I: F. P. Ramsey D H Mellor

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I should like to let Ramsey have the last word. In the summer of 1929, shortly before he died, he wrote a note on ‘Philosophy’ which Braithwaite published in his 1931 collection of Ramsey’s work [and is republished as Chapter 1 of my 1990 edition of Ramsey’s Philosophical Papers]. Most of Ramsey’s work is within philosophy rather than about it; but this note expresses his view of the subject as well as his attitude towards it and his way of doing it. So here, to conclude, are some excerpts:

Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions. Or else it is a disposition we have to check, and an enquiry to see that this is so; i.e. the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. …

And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense! … In philosophy we take the propositions we make in science and everyday life, and try to exhibit them in a logical system with primitive terms and definitions, etc. Essentially a philosophy is a system of definitions or, only too often, a system of descriptions of how definitions might be given …

I used to worry myself about the nature of philosophy through excessive scholasticism. I could not see how we could understand a word and not be able to recognise whether a proposed definition of it was or was not correct. I did not realise the vagueness of the whole idea of understanding, the reference it involves to a multitude of performances any of which may fail and require to be restored …

Philosophy is not concerned with special problems of definition but only with general ones: it does not propose to define particular terms of art or science, but to settle e. g. problems which arise in the definition of any such term or in the relation of any term in the physical world to the terms of experience …

[But] it seems to me that in the process of clarifying our thought we come to terms and sentences which we cannot elucidate in the obvious manner by defining their meaning. For instance, … theoretical terms we cannot define, but we can explain the way in which they are used, and in this explanation we are forced to look not only at the objects which we are talking about, but at our own mental states …

I find this self-consciousness inevitable in philosophy except in a very limited field. We are driven to philosophise because we do not know clearly what we mean; the question is always ‘What do I mean by x?’ And only very occasionally can we settle this without reflecting on meaning. But it is not only an obstacle, this necessity of dealing with meaning; it is doubtless an essential clue to the truth. If we neglect it I feel we may get into the absurd position of the child in the following dialogue: ‘Say breakfast.’ ‘Can’t.’ ‘What can’t you say?’ ‘Can’t say breakfast.’

But the necessity of self-consciousness must not be used as a justification for nonsensical hypotheses; we are doing philosophy not theoretical psychology, and our analyses of our statements, whether about meaning or about anything else, must be such as we can understand.