Michael Dummett

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Sir

Michael Dummett

FBA
Dummett in 2004
Born
Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett

(1925-06-27)27 June 1925
London, England
Died27 December 2011(2011-12-27) (aged 86)
Oxford, England
Burial placeWolvercote Cemetery, Oxford
EducationChrist Church, Oxford
(1947–50;[2] B.A., 1950)
Spouse
​
(m. 1951)​
Children7
Awards
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
Institutions
Doctoral studentsEva Picardi
Timothy Williamson
Main interests
Notable ideas

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett

academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality."[3] He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, notably as an interpreter of Frege, and made original contributions particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics
.

He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates between

proportionality for solid coalitions. Besides his main work in analytic philosophy and akin areas, he also wrote extensively on the history of card games, particularly on tarot card games
.

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,

Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford and was elected a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.[7][8]

Academic career

In 1979, Dummett became

Rolf Schock prize in 1995,[9] and was knighted in 1999. He was the 2010 winner of the Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Œuvre in Analytical Philosophy.[10]

During his career at Oxford, Dummett supervised many philosophers who went on to distinguished careers, including

Adrian Moore, Ian Rumfitt, and Crispin Wright
.

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

intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics
.

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

semantic inferentialism.[15]

Activism

Dummett was politically active, through his work as a campaigner against racism. He let his philosophical career stall in order to influence

civil rights for minorities during what he saw as a crucial period of reform in the late 1960s. He also worked on the theory of voting, which led to his introduction of the Quota Borda system
.

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.

He has written of his shock on finding

Frege, to whose work he had devoted such a high proportion of his professional career.[16]

In 1955–1956, while in

Civil Rights Movement and specifically of the Montgomery bus boycott. Dummett travelled to Montgomery and wrote his own account. However, The Guardian refused to publish Dummett's article and his refutation of Cooke's version of the Montgomery events, even in a shortened account as a Letter to the Editor; the BBC, too, also refused to publish it.[17]

Elections and voting

See also: Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem and Robin Farquharson

Dummett and

Kenneth J. Arrow and John Rawls, and by the economist Mark A. Satterthwaite.[20]

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

card games, The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City, attempted to establish that the invention of Tarot could be set in 15th-century Italy. He laid the foundation for most subsequent research on the game of tarot, including exhaustive accounts of the rules of all hitherto known forms of the game. Sylvia Mann goes as far as to say that The Game of Tarot "is the most important book on cards ever written."[21]

Dummett's analysis of the historical evidence suggested that

Austro-Hungary, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and even Russia. Not only was it, in these areas, a famous game with many devotees: it was also, during that period, more truly an international game than it had ever been before or than it has ever been since...."[22]

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

Roman Catholic Church and remained a practising Catholic. Throughout his career, Dummett published articles on various issues then facing the Catholic Church, mainly in the English Dominican journal New Blackfriars. Dummett published an essay in the bulletin of the Adoremus Society on the subject of liturgy,[24] and a philosophical essay defending the intelligibility of the Catholic Church's teaching on the Eucharist.[25]

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

Rolf Schock Prize for logic and philosophy in 1995. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1968, resigned in 1984, and was re-elected in 1995.[6]

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

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

International Playing Card Society
; with Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali, the catalogue Tarocchi: Gioco e magia alla Corte degli Estensi (Bologna, Nuova Alfa Editorale, 1987).

  • 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

References

  1. ^ a b c Dummett, Michael – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  2. ^ Brown, Stuart, ed. (2005). Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers. Vol. 1. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 237.
  3. ^ "Obituary for Professor Sir Michael Dummett". Telegraph. London. 28 December 2011. Retrieved 29 December 2011.
  4. ISBN 978-0-19-861411-1. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  5. ^ Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 1, ed. Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 2003, pp. 1260-1
  6. ^
    Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy. XVII. UK: British Academy
    : 191–228.
  7. ^ 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
  8. ISBN 9780198614111. Retrieved 24 March 2021. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  9. ^ "Rolf Schock Prize - Department of Philosophy". www.philosophy.su.se. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
  10. ^ Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ 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
  13. ^ 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
  14. ^ 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.
  15. ^ R. Ramanujam and Sundar Sarukkai, eds, Logic and Its Applications, Springer, 2009, p. 260.
  16. Harper & Row, 1973)/Second Edition (Harvard University Press, 1981), p. xii.
  17. ^ Michael Dummett, "Montgomery (and A. Cooke)". With an Introduction by Robert Bernasconi. Critical Philosophy of Race, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2015, pp. 1–19.
  18. S2CID 27639067
    .
  19. S2CID 17069971
    .
  20. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(75)90050-2
    .
  21. ISBN 978-94-009-3541-9
    .
  22. ^ Dummett, Michael (2004). A History of Games Played With the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs, Vol. 1.
  23. ^ 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.
  24. ^ Dummett, Michael (March 1997). "The Revision of the Roman Liturgy: A Review". Adoremus. Retrieved 29 April 2021.
  25. ^ 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.
  26. ^
    JSTOR 43248116
    .
  27. JSTOR 43248143
    .
  28. JSTOR 43251621
    .
  29. ^ Sir Michael Dummett obituary in The Scotsman Online.
  30. JSTOR 2184550
    .
  31. JSTOR 686924
    .
  32. JSTOR 687314
    .
  33. JSTOR 25478749
    .

Further reading

External links
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