Michael Dummett

Born in 1925, Professor Sir Michael Dummett spent most of his career working at the University of Oxford, becoming the Wykeham Professor of Logic there in 1979, a post that he held until his retirement in 1992. He was knighted in 1999 and died in 2011. His work in philosophy is marked by his voluminous study of Frege, a study that runs to five books and spans twenty years. Through his detailed engagement with Frege’s works, Dummett develops a number of his own contributions to the subject. He finds in Frege’s writings a distinctive view of the nature of analytical philosophy, which he embraces as the proper method for philosophy; a conception of the relation between a theory of understanding and that of reference; and a set of commitments that Dummett sees as being distinctively realist. With the publication of “Truth” in 1959, Dummett drew the attention of academic philosophers by advancing a conception of debates about realism as semantic disputes, that is, disputes about the relation of language to the world. The conception was refined and amplified through numerous works over the next forty years. Conceiving of the various realism debates as having an essential underlying commonality allowed Dummett to evince a general opposition to realism, which he calls anti-realism, and which, though owing much to the Fregean conception of the relation of the theory of understanding to that of reference, imports Wittgensteinian lessons to impose constraints on an adequate theory of understanding. Though this article concentrates exclusively on Dummett’s work in philosophy, Dummett also made contributions to social choice theory, the history of card games, writing style, and religion.