Games - Michael Dummett

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Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (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 studied at Christ Church, Oxford, and was awarded a fellowship at All Souls College. In 1979, he became Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, a post he held until retiring in 1992. He received a Knighthood 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 whole generation of British philosophers, including Gareth Evans.

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, 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.

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.

He has written of his shock on finding anti-Semitic opinions in Frege, to whose work he had devoted such a high proportion of his professional career.

Tarot

Michael Dummett 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. He argues that the medieval 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.

Representative works

Philosophical works:
* Frege: Philosophy of Language (London 1973/1981)
* Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (London 1991)
* Elements of Intuitionism (Oxford 1977, 2000)
* The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (London 1991)
* Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London 1993)
* The Seas of Language (Oxford 1993)
* Truth and Other Enigmas (London 1978)
* Truth and the Past (Oxford, 2005)
* Voting Procedures (Oxford 1984)
* Principles of Electoral Reform (New York 1997)
Tarot works:
* Game of Tarot (1980)
* Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (1986)

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