Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett,
FBA, D.Litt was a
British philosopher died he was 86.
[1] He was, until 1992,
Wykeham Professor of Logic at the
University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of
analytic philosophy, most notably as an interpreter of
Frege, and has made original contributions to the subject, particularly in
the philosophies of mathematics,
logic,
language and
metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications for the debates between
realism and
anti-realism, a term he helped popularize. He devised the
Quota Borda system of proportional voting, based on the
Borda count.
(27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011)
Education and Army Service
Dummett was the son of a merchant of silks. He studied at
Sandroyd School and was a First Scholar at
Winchester College, later winning a Major Scholarship to study History at
Christ Church, Oxford in 1943. He was called up that year and served, initially as a private in the
Royal Artillery before joining the
Intelligence Corps in India and Malaya. He was also awarded a fellowship to
All Souls College, Oxford.
Academic career
In 1979, Dummett became
Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, a post he held until retiring in 1992. During his term as Wykeham Professor, he held a Fellowship at
New College, Oxford. He has also held teaching posts at
Birmingham University,
UC Berkeley,
Stanford University,
Princeton University, and
Harvard University. He won the
Rolf Schock prize in 1995, and was
knighted in 1999. He was the 2010 winner of the
Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy.
During his career at Oxford, he supervised many philosophers who have gone on to distinguished careers, including
Peter Carruthers,
Ian Rumfitt, and
Crispin Wright.
Work in philosophy
His work on the German philosopher
Frege has been acclaimed. His first book
Frege: Philosophy of Language
(1973), written over many years, is now regarded as a classic. The book
was instrumental in the rediscovery of Frege's work, and influenced a
generation of British philosophers.
In his 1963 paper
Realism[2] he popularised a controversial approach to understanding the historical dispute between
realist and other non-realist schools of philosophy such as idealism, nominalism,
Irrealism etc. He characterized all of these latter positions 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 accepting the classical characterisation of truth as
bivalent
and evidence-transcendent, while anti-realism rejects this in favor of a
concept of knowable truth. Historically, these debates had been
understood as disagreements about whether a certain type of entity
objectively exists or not. Thus, we may speak of (anti-)realism with
respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical
entities (such as
natural numbers),
moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The novelty of
Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as, at base,
analogous to the dispute between
intuitionism and
platonism in the
philosophy of mathematics.
It is now common, thanks to Dummett's influence, to speak of a
post-Dummettian generation of English philosophers, including such
figures as
John McDowell,
Christopher Peacocke, and
Crispin Wright—though only Wright has been fairly close to Dummett on substantive philosophical questions.
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 has 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 is founded in racism and says that
this has especially been so in the UK.
He has written of his shock on finding anti-Semitic and fascist opinions in the diaries of
Frege, to whose work he had devoted such a high proportion of his professional career.
Elections and voting
Dummett and
Robin Farquharson
published influential articles on the theory of voting, in particular
conjecturing that deterministic voting rules with more than three issues
faced endemic
strategic voting.
[3] The Dummett-Farquharson conjecture was proved by
Allan Gibbard, a philosopher and former student of
Kenneth J. Arrow and
John Rawls, and by Mark A. Satterthwaite, an economist.
[4]
After the establishment of the Farquarson-Dummett conjecture by
Gibbard and Sattherthwaite, Dummett contributed three proofs of the
Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem in his monograph on voting. He also wrote a shorter overview of the theory of voting for the educated public.
Card games and tarot
Dummett was also an established scholar in the field of
card games history, with numerous books and articles to his credit. He is a founding member of the
International Playing-Card Society, in whose journal
The Playing-Card
he regularly published opinions, research and reviews of current
literature on the subject; he is also a founding member of the
Accademia del Tarocchino Bolognese in
Bologna. His historical work on the use of the tarot pack in
card games - he has said "(t)he fortune telling and occult part of it has never been my principal interest..."
[5] -
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 of the subsequent research on the game of
tarot, including exhaustive accounts of the rules of all hitherto known forms of the game.
[citation needed]
His analysis of the historical evidence suggested that
fortune-telling and occult interpretations were unknown prior to the
18th century. During most of their recorded history, he wrote, Tarot
cards were used to play an extremely popular trick-taking game which is
still enjoyed in much of Europe. Dummett showed that the middle of the
18th century saw a great development in the game of Tarot, including a
modernized deck with French suit-signs, and without the medieval
allegories that interest occultists, along with a growth in Tarot's
popularity. "The hundred years between about 1730 and 1830 were the
heyday of the game of Tarot; it was played not only in northern Italy,
eastern France, Switzerland, Germany and 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...."
[6]
Conversion to Roman Catholicism
In 1944 he was received into the
Roman Catholic Church,
and remained a practising Catholic. Throughout his career, Dummett
published a number of articles on various issues facing the contemporary
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, and a philosophical essay defending the
intelligibility of the Catholic Church's teaching on the
eucharist ("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.)
In October 1987, one of his contributions to
New Blackfriars
sparked considerable controversy, when he seemingly attacked currents of
Catholic theology which appeared to him to diverge from orthodox
Catholicism and 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." A debate in the journal over these remarks continued for
months, attracting contributions from the theologian
Nicholas Lash and the historian
Eamon Duffy, among others. {{
1987 - Volume 68 New Blackfriars (Isuue 809, 811)}}
Later years and family
Dummett retired in 1992 and was knighted in 1999 for “services to philosophy and to racial justice”. He received the
Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science in 1994.
Sir Michael Dummett died in 2011, aged 86. He was survived by his wife
Ann,
whom he married in 1951 (and who died in 2012), and by three sons and
two daughters. A son and daughter predeceased their parents.
[7]
Works
- On analytical philosophy and logic:
- The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy, Harvard University Press
- Frege: Philosophy of Language (Harvard University Press, 1973/1981)
- Elements of Intuitionism (Oxford, 1977, 2000)
- Truth and Other Enigmas (Harvard University Press, 1978)
- 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)
- Truth and the Past (Oxford, 2005)
- Thought and Reality (Oxford, 2006)
- On voting theory and election systems:
- Voting Procedures (Oxford, 1984)
- Principles of Electoral Reform (New York, 1997) ISBN 0-19-829246-5
- Robin Farquharson and Michael Dummett (January 1961). "Stability in Voting". Econometrica 29 (1): 33–43. doi:10.2307/1907685. JSTOR 1907685.
- Dummett, Michael (2005). "The work and life of Robin Farquharson". Social Choice and Welfare 25 (2): 475–83. doi:10.1007/s00355-005-0014-x.
- Rudolf Farra and Maurice Salles
(October 2006). "An Interview with Michael Dummett: From analytical
philosophy to voting analysis and beyond". Social Choice and Welfare 27 (2).
- 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 catalogs 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)
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