Cambridge and Vienna

The Institute Vienna Circle held a conference in Vienna in 2003, Cambridge and Vienna - Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, to commemorate the philosophical and scientific work of Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930). This Ramsey conference provided not only historical and biographical perspectives on one of the most gifted thinkers of the Twentieth Century, but also new impulses for further research on at least some of the topics pioneered by Ramsey, whose interest and potential are greater than ever.

Ramsey did pioneering work in several fields, practitioners of which rarely know of his important work in other fields: philosophy of logic and theory of language, foundations of mathematics, mathematics, probability theory, methodology of science, philosophy of psychology, and economics. There was a focus on the one topic which was of strongest mutual concern to Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, namely the question of foundations of mathematics, in particular the status of logicism.

Although the major scientific connection linking Ramsey with Austria is his work on logic, to which the Vienna Circle dedicated several meetings, certainly the connection which is of greater general interest concerns Ramsey's visits and discussions with Wittgenstein. Ramsey was the only important thinker to actually visit Wittgenstein during his school-teaching career in Puchberg and Ottertal in the 1920s, in Lower Austria; and later, Ramsey was instrumental in getting Wittgenstein positions at Cambridge.

Inhalt

Cambridge and Vienna. Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle.- Frank Ramsey - A Biographical Sketch.- Wittgenstein and Ramsey.- The Vicious Circle Principle.- Ramsey's Psychological Theory of Belief.- Discovering "Weight, or the Value of Knowledge".- Ramsey's Ramsey-sentences.- Ramsey and the Vienna Circle on Logicism.- Logical Problems Suggested by Logicism.- The Foundation of Human Evaluation in Democracies from Ramsey to Damasio.- Ramsey'S "Note on Time".- General Part.- Philosophy of Science after the Social Turn.- Notes on the Origins of Fleck's Concept of "Denkstil".- Hans Reichenbach and Logical Empiricism in Turkey.- Steve Awodey & Carsten Klein (eds.), Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena. Full Circle: Publications of the Archive of Scientific Philosophy. Volume 2. Chicago: Open Court, 2004.- Bergmann, Gustav, Collected Works Vol. I: Selected Papers I, edited by E. Tegtmeier, Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos-Verlag, 2003.- Ferrari, Massimo: Ernst Cassirer - Stationen einer philosophischen Biographie. Von der Marburger Schule zur Kulturphilosophie, Meiner: Hamburg, 2003 (German translation of Cassirer. Dalla Scuola di Marburgo alla filosofia della cultura, Florence: Olschki, 1996).- Richard C. Jeffrey, Subjective Probability: The Real Thing, Cambridge University Press, 2004; Richard C. Jeffrey, After Logical Empiricism/Depois do Empirismo Lógico, English edition with Portuguese translation by António Zilão, Lisbon: Colibri, 2002.- Patrick Suppes, Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures, CSLI publications, Stanford, California (distributed by Chicago University Press).