Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett F.B.A., 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. Year 1925 (MCMXXV) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... Analytic philosophy (sometimes, analytical philosophy) is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. ... // Philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. ... Philosophy of logic is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature and justification of systems of logic. ... Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. ... Plato (Left) and Aristotle (right), by Raphael (Stanza della Segnatura, Rome) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the ultimate nature of reality, being, and the world. ... The Quota Borda System or Quota Preference Score was devised by the british philosopher Michael Dummett and first published in 1984 in his book, Voting Procedures, and again in his Principles of Electoral Reform in 1997. ... The Borda count is a single winner election method in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. ... This article is about the general history, iconography, and uses of tarot cards. ... Nationality law is the branch of a countrys legal system wherein legislation, custom and court precendent combine to define the ways in which that countrys nationality and citizenship are transmitted, acquired or lost. ... “Catholic Church” redirects here. ...

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. Winchester College is a well-known boys independent school, and an example of an English public school, in the city of Winchester in Hampshire, England. ... College name Christ Church Named after Jesus Christ Established 1546 Sister College Trinity College Dean The Very Revd Christopher Andrew Lewis JCR President William Dorsey Undergraduates 426 MCR or GCR President {{{MCR President}}} Graduates 154 Home page Boat Club Christ Church (Latin: Ædes Christi, the temple or house of Christ... College name All Souls College Collegium Omnium Animarum Named after Feast of All Souls Established 1438 Sister College Trinity Hall, Cambridge Warden Dr. John Davis JCR President None Undergraduates None MCR President None Graduates 8 (approx. ... The University of Oxford has three statutory professorships named after William of Wykeham. ... and of the New College College name New College of St Mary Latin name Collegium Novum Oxoniensis/Collegium Sanctae Mariae Wintoniae Named after Mary, mother of Jesus Established 1379 Sister college Kings College, Cambridge Warden Prof. ... The Schock Prizes were instituted by the will of philosopher and artist Rolf Schock (1933-1986). ... The silver Anglia knight, commissioned as a trophy in 1850, intended to represent the Black Prince. ...

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 whole generation of British philosophers, including Gareth Evans. Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848, Wismar – 26 July 1925, IPA: ) was a German mathematician who became a logician and philosopher. ... Gareth Evans (12 May 1946 – 10 August 1980) was a British philosopher at Oxford University during the 1970s. ...

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. Contemporary philosophical realism, also referred to as metaphysical realism, is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... In philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of the objective reality of entities of a certain type or the insistence that we should be agnostic about their real existence. ... Natural number can mean either a positive integer (1, 2, 3, 4, ...) or a non-negative integer (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...). Natural numbers have two main purposes: they can be used for counting (there are 3 apples on the table), or they can be used for ordering (this is... In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach to mathematics as the constructive mental activity of humans. ... Platonic idealism is the theory that the substantive reality around us is only a reflection of a higher truth. ... // Philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications 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. The 1960s decade refers to the years from 1960 to 1969, inclusive. ... The Quota Borda System or Quota Preference Score was devised by the british philosopher Michael Dummett and first published in 1984 in his book, Voting Procedures, and again in his Principles of Electoral Reform in 1997. ...

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. Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (November 8, 1848 - July 26, 1925) was a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is regarded as a founder of both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. ...

Tarot

Sir Michael is also a leading historian in the research of the Tarot with various publications to his credit including "The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake city", 1980, which left its mark on the field of literature about the venerable deck of cards. Dummett championed the use of the tarot cards for trick taking card games and expressed some disdain for the later occult practices to which the cards were often put. It should be noted that as a converted Catholic, and a critical one at that, Dummett presumably follows the commands of the Scriptures who are quite explicit about the consequences suffered by believers in divination and the like. He argues that the Renaissance use of the Tarot was as a set of playing cards and that it only acquired its association with the occult in the 18th century. Dummett champions the theory that since the oldest tarot decks are from the XVth century and have been found in Northern Italy, it follows that the first deck, or prototarot, was created there in the Renaissance. Critics argue among other things that the iconographic program of the best known deck, the Tarot de Marseille, is medieval and not Renaissance. Austrian-style 54-card Tarock hand: the Fool; six trumps; King, Queen, 1 of hearts. ... (17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ...

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.) “Catholic Church” redirects here. ... For other uses, see Eucharist (disambiguation). ...

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. Eamon Duffy is an Irish Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and former President of Magdalene College. ...

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:
  • Game of Tarot (1980)
  • Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (1986)
  • A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot, coauthor with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis (New York, 1996)
  • A History of the Occult Tarot: 1870-1970, coauthor with Ronald Decker (New York, 2002)
  • A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs , coauthor with John McLeod (2004)

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

Is logic empirical? is the title of two articles that discuss the idea that the algebraic properties of logic may, or should, be empirically determined; in particular, they deal with the question of whether empirical facts about quantum phenomena may provide grounds for revising classical logic as a consistent logical... Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in Western philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. ... In mathematical physics and quantum mechanics, quantum logic can be regarded as a kind of propositional logic suitable for understanding the apparent anomalies regarding quantum measurement, most notably those concerning composition of measurement operations of complementary variables. ... The principle of truth-value links is a concept in metaphysics discussed in debates between philosophical realism and anti-realism. ...

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.