Michael Dummett
Michael Dummett | ||
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Born | Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett 27 June 1925 London, England | |
Died | 27 December 2011 Oxford, England | (aged 86)|
Burial place | Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford | |
Education | Christ Church, Oxford (1947–50;[2] B.A., 1950) | |
Spouse | ||
Children | 7 | |
Awards |
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Era | School Analytic philosophy | |
Institutions | ||
Doctoral students | Eva Picardi Timothy Williamson | |
Main interests |
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Notable ideas |
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Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett
He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates between
He was married to the political activist Ann Dummett from 1951 until his death in 2011.
Education and army service
Born 27 June 1925 at his parents' house, 56,
Academic career
In 1979, Dummett became
During his career at Oxford, Dummett supervised many philosophers who went on to distinguished careers, including
Philosophical work
Dummett's work on the German philosopher Frege has been acclaimed. His first book Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973), written over many years, is seen as a classic. It was instrumental in the rediscovery of Frege's work, and influenced a generation of British philosophers.
In his 1963 paper "Realism", he popularised a controversial approach to understanding the historical dispute between realist and other non-realist philosophy such as idealism, nominalism, irrealism.[11] He classed all the latter as anti-realist and argued that the fundamental disagreement between realist and anti-realist was over the nature of truth.
For Dummett, realism is best understood as semantic realism, i.e. the view that every declarative sentence in one's language is
Dummett espoused semantic anti-realism, a position suggesting that truth cannot serve as the central notion in the theory of meaning and must be replaced by
Activism
Dummett was politically active, through his work as a campaigner against racism. He let his philosophical career stall in order to influence
Dummett drew heavily on his work in this area in writing his book On Immigration and Refugees, an account of what justice demands of states in relationship to movement between states. Dummett, in that book, argues that the vast majority of opposition to immigration has been founded on racism, and says that this has especially been so in the UK. In the book, Dummett argued in favour of open borders and mass migration, except when states were "under special threat" and could therefore refuse entry.
He has written of his shock on finding
In 1955–1956, while in
Elections and voting
Dummett and
After the establishment of the Farquharson–Dummett conjecture by Gibbard and Satterthwaite, Dummett contributed three proofs of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem in a monograph on voting. He also wrote a shorter overview of the theory of voting, for the educated public.[citation needed]
Card games and tarot
Dummett was a scholar in the field of
Dummett's analysis of the historical evidence suggested that
In 1987, Dummett collaborated with Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali on the project of a great Tarot exhibition at Castello Estense in Ferrara. On that occasion he wrote some texts for the catalogue of the exhibition.[23]
Roman Catholicism
In 1944, Dummett was received into the
In October 1987, one of his contributions to New Blackfriars sparked controversy by seemingly attacking currents of Catholic theology that appeared to him to diverge from orthodox Catholicism and "imply that, from the very earliest times, the Catholic Church, claiming to have a mission from God to safeguard divinely revealed truth, has taught and insisted on the acceptance of falsehoods."[26] Dummett argued that "the divergence which now obtains between what the Catholic Church purports to believe and what large or important sections of it in fact believe ought, in my view, to be tolerated no longer: not if there is to be a rationale for belonging to that Church; not if there is to be any hope of reunion with the other half of Christendom; not if the Catholic Church is not to be a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world."[26] A debate on these remarks continued for months, with the theologian Nicholas Lash[27] and the historian Eamon Duffy among the contributors.[28]
Later years and family
Dummett retired in 1992 and was knighted in 1999 for "services to philosophy and to racial justice". He received the
Dummett died on 27 December 2011 aged 86, leaving his wife Ann (married in 1951, died in 2012) and three sons and two daughters. A son and a daughter predeceased them.[29] He is buried at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.[6]
Works
- On analytical philosophy and logic:
- Frege: Philosophy of Language (Harvard University Press, 1973/1981)
- Duckworth, 1981; Harvard University Press[30]
- Elements of Intuitionism (Oxford, 1977, 2000)[31]
- Truth and Other Enigmas (Harvard University Press, 1978)[32]
- Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (Harvard University Press, 1991)
- The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Harvard University Press, 1991)
- Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1993)
- The Seas of Language (Oxford, 1993)
- Frege and Other Philosophers (Oxford, 1991)
- Truth and the Past (Oxford, 2005)[33]
- Thought and Reality (Oxford, 2006)
- The Nature and Future of Philosophy (Columbia, 2010)
- On voting theory and election systems:
- Voting Procedures (Oxford, 1984)
- ISBN 0-19-829246-5
- JSTOR 1907685.
- Dummett, Michael (2005). "The work and life of Robin Farquharson". Social Choice and Welfare. 25 (2): 475–83. S2CID 27639067.
- Rudolf Farra and Maurice Salles (October 2006). "An Interview with Michael Dummett: From analytical philosophy to voting analysis and beyond" (PDF). Social Choice and Welfare. 27 (2): 347–364. S2CID 46164353.
- On politics:
- On Immigration and Refugees (London, 2001)
- Tarot works:
- The Game of Tarot: from Ferrara to Salt Lake City (Duckworth, 1980)
- Twelve Tarot Games (Duckworth, 1980)
- The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (G. Braziller, 1986)
- Il mondo e l'angelo: i tarocchi e la loro storia (Bibliopolis, 1993)
- I tarocchi siciliani (La Zisa, 1995)
- A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis, St. Martin's Press, 1996)
- A History of the Occult Tarot, 1870-1970 (with Ronald Decker, Duckworth, 2002)
- A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack (with John McLeod, E. Mellen Press, 2004)
Notable articles and exhibition catalogues include "Tarot Triumphant: Tracing the Tarot" in FMR, (Franco Maria Ricci International), January/February 1985; Pattern Sheets published by the
- On the written word:
- Grammar and Style (Duckworth, 1993)
For more complete publication details see the "Bibliography of the Writings of Michael Dummett" in R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (2007).
See also
- "Is Logic Empirical?", which discusses an article by Dummett on an argument of Hilary Putnam for the correctness of quantum logic
- Truth-value link realism, which Dummett criticized in early works
References
- ^ a b c Dummett, Michael – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Brown, Stuart, ed. (2005). Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers. Vol. 1. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 237.
- ^ "Obituary for Professor Sir Michael Dummett". Telegraph. London. 28 December 2011. Retrieved 29 December 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-19-861411-1. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 1, ed. Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 2003, pp. 1260-1
- ^ Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy. XVII. UK: British Academy: 191–228.
- ^ Isaacson, Daniel "In Memoriam: Michael Dummett (1925–2011)". *Originally published at Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford News Archived 18 January 2021 at the Wayback Machine
- required.)
- ^ "Rolf Schock Prize - Department of Philosophy". www.philosophy.su.se. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
- ^ Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy.
- ^ Originally a lecture to the Philosophical Society at Oxford in 1963, first published in 1978 in his book Truth and Other Enigmas. See Truth and Other Enigmas, p. ix.
- ^ Tennant, Neil (2017), "Logicism and Neologicism", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 30 April 2021
- ^ Glanzberg, Michael (2021), "Truth", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 30 April 2021
- ^ Panu Raatikainen, "The Semantic Realism/Anti-Realism Dispute and Knowledge of Meanings", The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 5(1): 1–13. 2010.
- ^ R. Ramanujam and Sundar Sarukkai, eds, Logic and Its Applications, Springer, 2009, p. 260.
- Harper & Row, 1973)/Second Edition (Harvard University Press, 1981), p. xii.
- ^ Michael Dummett, "Montgomery (and A. Cooke)". With an Introduction by Robert Bernasconi. Critical Philosophy of Race, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2015, pp. 1–19.
- S2CID 27639067.
- S2CID 17069971.
- .
- ISBN 978-94-009-3541-9.
- ^ Dummett, Michael (2004). A History of Games Played With the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs, Vol. 1.
- ^ Dummett, Michael (1987). "Sulle origini dei Tarocchi popolari" and "Tarocchi popolari e Tarocchi fantastici", in Le carte di Corte. I Tarocchi. Gioco e magia alla Corte degli Estensi, Nuova Alfa editoriale, Bologna 1987, pp. 78–88.
- ^ Dummett, Michael (March 1997). "The Revision of the Roman Liturgy: A Review". Adoremus. Retrieved 29 April 2021.
- ^ Dummett M. (1987) "The Intelligibility of Eucharistic Doctrine", In: William J. Abraham and Steven W. Holzer, eds., The Rationality of Religious Belief: Essays in Honour of Basil Mitchell, Clarendon Press, 1987.
- ^ JSTOR 43248116.
- JSTOR 43248143.
- JSTOR 43251621.
- ^ Sir Michael Dummett obituary in The Scotsman Online.
- JSTOR 2184550.
- JSTOR 686924.
- JSTOR 687314.
- JSTOR 25478749.
Further reading
- Johannes L Brandl and Peter Sullivan (eds.) New Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Dummett. Rodopi, 1999. ISBN 90-420-0466-5
- Richard Kirkham. Theories of Truth. MIT Press, 1992. Chapter 8 is a discussion of Dummett's views on meaning.
- ISBN 0-7456-2295-X
- Richard G. Heck (ed.) Language, Thought, and Logic: Essays in Honour of Michael Dummett. Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-823920-3
- Bernhard Weiss. ISBN 0-691-11330-0
- Anat Matar. From Dummett's Philosophical Perspective, Walter de Gruyter, 1997. ISBN 3110149869
- The Library of Living Philosophers, vol XXXI Open Court, Chicago, 2007.
External links
- Quotations related to Michael Dummett at Wikiquote
- Michael Dummett at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Biographical notes at Trionfi
- Philosophy Bites interview with Dummett on Frege
- "Remembering Michael Dummett", at The Stone, New York Times blogs, 4 January 2012
- "Sir Michael Dummett obituary" by A. W. Moore, The Guardian, 28 December 2011
- Dummett, Michael (1 January 1975), Rose, H. E.; Shepherdson, J. C. (eds.), "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic", Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Logic Colloquium '73, Elsevier, vol.80, pp.5–40,
- "Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett". Find a Grave.