Influential British philosopher Sir Michael Dummett died at 86 in the last days of 2011. Over the years we’ve been the publisher of many of Dummett’s books, including his classic studies of the 19th-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes the importance of Dummett’s work on Frege:
Dummett has argued that analytical philosophy is based on Frege’s insight that the correct way to study thought is to study language. He holds that Frege advocated a realist semantic theory. According to such a theory every sentence (and thus every thought we are capable of expressing) is determinately true or false, even though we may not have any means of discovering which it is.
Perhaps Dummett’s own most significant work was the development of “anti-realism,” a way of thinking that took issue with Frege’s realist theory. From The Guardian’s obituary of Dummett:
Dummett believed that Frege made certain assumptions concerning truth and falsehood that could be called into question. Frege allowed for the possibility of a thought that was neither true nor false. An example would be the thought that Father Christmas smokes. Given that there is no such person as Father Christmas, then neither is there anything to make this thought true or false. But Frege was not in the least reluctant to admit that a thought could be true or false without our having any way of telling which. An example might be the thought that Plato would have enjoyed smoking. This is what caused Dummett to pause.
He did not see how we could understand a sentence without having some way of manifesting our understanding. And he did not see how we could manifest this without being able to tell whether the thought expressed was true or false. So the assumption that a given thought could be true or false even though we had no way of telling which – an assumption that Dummett called "realism" concerning the thought – was immediately problematical.
In another of his influential works, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Dummett sought to help bridge the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy by revisiting the moment when the traditions diverged. Simon Critchley quotes the following passage from Origins in a recent appreciation:
I do not mean to pretend that one should pretend that philosophy in the two traditions is basically the same; obviously that would be ridiculous. We can re-establish communication only by going back to the point of divergence. It’s no use now shouting across the gulf. It is obvious that philosophers will never reach agreement. It is a pity, however, if they can no longer talk to one another or understand one another. It is difficult to achieve such understanding, because if you think people are on the wrong track, you may have no great desire to talk with them or to take the trouble to criticize their views. But we have reached a point at which it is as if we’re working in different subjects.
At the NYT Opinionator, you can read reflections on Dummett from over two dozen fellow philosophers, including Timothy Williamson, Dorothy Edgington, and Hilary Putnam, who notes of Dummett that he “cared about ideas, he cared about people, he cared about society, and he rightly connected caring about any one of the three and caring about the other two.”
