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Obituary

Michael Dummett (1925-2011)

Menno Lievers tells us about the ideas and life of an influential British philosopher.

Philosophy in the 20th century, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has been dominated by ‘the linguistic turn’. This shift in ideas said that philosophical problems could only be solved by attending carefully to the terms in which these problems were phrased. The recently deceased Oxford philosopher Sir Michael Dummett not only endorsed this view, but pushed this methodology to its limits.

What could possibly justify the outlandish proposal that philosophical problems ought to be rephrased as questions about language? Shouldn’t philosophy be concerned with actual problems? Dummett’s work provides us with at least two arguments for the linguistic turn. The first is that an analysis of thought necessarily proceeds via an analysis of language.

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