Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays

Book excerpt: This is Volume V in a series of eight on the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. Originally published in 1931, this study offers a collection of logical essays around the topic of the foundations of mathematics. Though mathematical teaching was Ramsey's profession, philosophy was his vocation. Reared on the logic of Principia Mathematica, he was early to see the importance of Dr. Wittgenstein's work (in the translation of which he assisted); and his own published papers were largely based on this. But the previously unprinted essays and notes collected in this volume show him moving towards a kind of pragmatism, and the general treatise on logic upon which at various times he had been engaged was to have treated truth and knowledge as purely natural phenomena to be explained psychologically without recourse to distinctively logical relations.