of logic and language. Born in London and educated at Oxford, Dummett was a Fellow of All Souls, and from 1979 to 1992 held the chair of logic at Oxford. Dummett was one of the most influential British philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. His work centred upon the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mathematics, and showed a marked sympathy with verificationist and constructivist ideals. Almost singlehandedly he kept the flame of mathematical intuitionism alive as philosophically interesting, while his massive works in the philosophy of language inspired interest in the relationship between evidence, or assertibility, on the one hand, and truth on the other (see also realism/anti-realism).

Dummett was also known for an uncompromising re-evaluation of the western tradition, viewing writings before the rise of analytic philosophy as fatally flawed by having taken epistemology to be fundamental, whereas the correct approach, giving a foundational place to a concern with language, only took wing with the work of Frege. Critics have queried whether Frege’s thought was thus born ‘unfertilized by external inferences’, and have objected there is more than a passing concern with meaning in Plato, Aristotle, the Nyaya school of Indian philosophy, and many others. Equally, the supposedly pure investigation of language in the 20th century often kept some dubious epistemological and metaphysical company.

Dummett’s works included Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973), and the collections of essays Truth and Other Enigmas (1978) and The Seas of Language (1994). Rather different interests were met in The Game of Tarot (1980), an exploration of the game designed to discredit what Dummett regards as the irrational theories and pseudo-history of occultists, and Style and Grammar, an explanation of the correct way to write lucidly (1993).