Ramsey and Wittgenstein
When I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, both Fellows of Magdalene, first met Ramsey, he expressed his interest in learning German. According to Richards, he mastered the language "in almost hardly over a week," although other sources show he took before that one year of German in school. Ramsey was then able, at the age of 19, to make the first draft of the translation of the German text of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Ramsey was impressed by Wittgenstein’s work and after graduating as Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1923 he made a journey to Austria to visit Wittgenstein, at that time teaching in a primary school in the small community of Puchberg am Schneeberg. For two weeks Ramsey discussed the difficulties he was facing in understanding the Tractatus. Wittgenstein made some corrections to the English translation in Ramsey’s copy and some annotations and changes to the German text that subsequently appeared in the second edition in 1933.
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“What can be shown, cannot be said.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)