Michael Dummett 1925 – 2011
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was a British philosopher of logic, language, and mathematics and a long-serving Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. His monumental Frege: Philosophy of Language reread Frege as the founder of analytic philosophy and articulated Dummett's own program in which the theory of meaning is the foundation of metaphysics. He defended an anti-realist position according to which truth is a matter of justified assertibility rather than correspondence to a mind-independent reality. He was also a leading historian of medieval Catholic art and a tireless campaigner against racial discrimination in Britain.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“The theory of meaning is the foundation of metaphysics.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Truth is a matter of justified assertibility, not of bare correspondence.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Realism is the thesis that statements are determinately true or false independently of our means of knowing.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Meaning is what we know when we understand a sentence.”
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Attributed to Michael Dummett:
“Logic without philosophy of language is empty; philosophy of language without logic is blind.”