Michael Dummett

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of mathematics Philosophy of logic Philosophy of language Metaphysics

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt (born 1925) is a leading British philosopher. He has both written on the history of analytic philosophy, and made original contributions to the subject, particularly in the areas of philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics. He also devised the Quota Borda system of proportional voting, based on the Borda count, and has written scholarly works on tarot. Other interests have been immigration law and English grammar and usage. In 1944 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and remains a practising Catholic.

He attended Winchester College, before going up to Christ Church, Oxford. Upon graduation he was awarded a fellowship to the elite All Souls College, Oxford. In 1979, he 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 won the Rolf Schock prize in 1995, and was knighted in 1999.

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 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. He has claimed that 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 has been 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 opinions in the diaries of Frege, to whose work he had devoted such a high proportion of his professional career.

Tarot

Sir Michael Dummett is also the foremost scholar in the field of Tarot 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 publishes 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 encyclopedic, groundbreaking and painstakingly documented The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (Duckworth, 1980), established the invention of Tarot in 15th-century Italy and laid the foundation for all subsequent research on the game of Tarot, including exhaustive accounts of the rules of all hitherto known forms of the game. An important result of Dummett's analysis of the historical evidence was to demonstrate that fortune-telling and occult interpretations were unknown prior to the 18th century. During most of their history, Tarot cards were used to play an extremely popular trick-taking game which is still enjoyed in much of Europe. Around the turn of the 16th century Tarot became popular in France, and from there spread to Germany, Switzerland, and beyond. Also in the 16th century, Tarot was used as a literary motif for poetic parlor games, sometimes termed tarocchi appropriati. Dummett showed that the middle of the 1700s saw a great development in the game of Tarot, including a modernized deck, (with French suit-signs, and without the medieval allegories that occultists have found irresistable), 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...." He is also the preeminent scholar of occult-Tarot history, from the groundbreaking chapter in The Game of Tarot (chapter 6) through A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996) detailing the origin and first century of occult Tarot, and A History of the Occult Tarot, 1870-1970 (2004) detailing the figures and developments of the second century of occult Tarot.

Catholicism

Throughout his career, Dummett has published a number of articles on various issues facing the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, mainly in the English Dominican journal New Blackfriars. Dummett has also 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 of 1987, one of his contributions to New Blackfriars sparked considerable controversy, when he attacked currents of Catholic theology that diverged from traditional 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.

Works

• On analytical philosophy and logic:
  • Frege: Philosophy of Language (London, 1973/1981)
  • Elements of Intuitionism (Oxford, 1977, 2000)
  • Truth and Other Enigmas (London, 1978)
  • Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (London, 1991)
  • The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (London, 1991)
  • Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London, 1993)
  • The Seas of Language (Oxford, 1993)
  • Truth and the Past (Oxford, 2005)
  • Thought and Reality (Oxford, 2006)
• On politics:
  • Voting Procedures (Oxford, 1984)
  • Principles of Electoral Reform (New York, 1997)
  • 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 Berti and Vitali, the catalogue Tarocchi: Gioco e magia alla Corte degli Estensi (Bologna, Nuova Alfa Editorale, 1987).

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

• Johannes L Brandl, Peter Sullivan (eds.) New Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Dummett. Rodopi, 1999. ISBN 9042004665
• Richard Kirkham. Theories of Truth. MIT Press, 1992. Chapter 8 is a discussion of Dummett's views on meaning.
• Karen Green. Dummett: Philosophy of Language. Polity, 2001. 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. Michael Dummett. Princeton University Press, 2002.ISBN 0-691-11330-0
• Anat Matar. From Dummett's Philosophical Perspective, Walter de Gruyter, 1997.ISBN 3110149869
• R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol XXXI Open Court, Chicago, 2007.

External links

• Article on Michael Dummett at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Biographical notes on Michael Dummett at Trionfi, a database about the tarot.
• Critic of Michael Dummett' Theory of a Lombardian Tarot Origin at Tarotchoco, a blog about the history of Tarot.