Michael Dummett

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett, FBA (27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011) was a British philosopher, described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality.". 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. In mathematical logic, he developed an intermediate logic, already studied by Kurt Gödel: the so-called Gödel-Dummett logic.

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.