This section contains 4,687 words (approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page) |
Dictionary of Literary Biography on Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett
Since the mid 1950s, and certainly since the publication in 1959 of his paper "Truth" (collected in Truth and Other Enigmas, 1978), Michael (now Sir Michael) Dummett has exerted a considerable influence on philosophical work in Britain. His influence on American philosophy is less obvious, but he has made his presence felt there, too, partly through his dialogues with and critiques of Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Hilary Putnam. Dummett thinks that philosophy, like natural science, aims at discovering truth but that the process of discovery in philosophy is quite different from that in science. The questions in which philosophers are interested are difficult to solve not because the relevant facts are obscure but because it is difficult to bring them within the scope of an explanatory theory. Therefore, Dummett should be distinguished both from those philosophers who think that philosophy should aim at "dissolving" rather...
This section contains 4,687 words (approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page) |