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Origins of Analytical Philosophy
This book studies the roots of analytical philosophy - that style of philosophizing that has for half a century dominated professional philosophy in English-speaking lands and is often called "Anglo-American, " as contrasted with the "Continental, " philosophy. This, Dummett argues, is a misnomer. "Anglo-Austrian" would be a better label, for analytical philosophy arose in the same milieu as the principal rival school of phenomenology. Not only that, but the two schools have the same roots. The two forebears of both schools are Bolzano, the first to deny that thoughts are contents of the mind, and Brentano, who made intentionality the defining characteristic of the mental. Analytical philosophy has been distinguished by the central place it has given to language. Dummett explains why what had gone before made this "linguistic turn" so natural, and why the school founded by Husserl failed to take it. By re-examining the similar origins of the two traditions, we can come to understand why the later diverged so widely, and so take the first step to reconciliation.
199 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
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About the author
Michael Dummett
53 books52 followersA skilled analytic mind and an ardent voice against racism, Sir Michael A. E. Dummett is considered by many to be one of twentieth-century Britain’s most influential philosophers of language. Dummett is best known for his work in the history of analytic philosophy and in his contributions to the philosophy of language and mathematics. Much of his work has taken the form of commentary on the likes of Frege, Wittgenstein, and Quine. Dummett, who considered himself a Wittgensteinian, is widely held as the English authority on the work of German logician Gottlob Frege. Though Dummett diverges from Frege, who is a realist, most of Dummett’s achievements have been pursued in connection with his enthusiasm for Frege’s thought.
Dummett was born in London in 1925 and attended prestigious boys’ schools in Wiltshire and Hampshire. Though he rejected religious belief in his youth, Dummett converted to Catholicism while serving in the armed forces during the Second World War. After his military service he went to Oxford University where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Christ Church College. He graduated in 1950 with first class honors and was awarded a fellowship at All Souls College. Throughout his acclaimed career Dummett remained associated with Oxford, though he has held visiting posts at several universities around the world. In 1962 he was appointed reader in the philosophy of mathematics at Oxford; in 1979 he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic, where he served as chair until his retirement in 1992. Dummett, along with his wife, has remained active in antiracist campaigns and political reforms, even placing his philosophical career on hold for several years during the sixties to pursue these causes. He received a knighthood in 1999.
Many of Britain’s leading analytic philosophers have been significantly influenced by Dummett, including Crispin Wright, Simon Blackburn, John McDowell, and Timothy Williamson — though none would be properly classed a disciple. Dummett’s most notable contributions have come in his analysis of theories of meaning accounting for communication, reason, and representation in language. His commitment to a kind of anti-realism in debates about reference and language, though often overstated, has been a point of particular interest for his admirers and detractors alike. Dummett was not satisfied with the pessimism of Wittgenstein and the holists who denied the possibility of finally understanding a language from within language. Dummett argues that an alternative can be found if one denies the principle of bivalence. Bivalence is the notion that every meaningful proposition is either true or false; and in Dummett’s view the denial of bivalence entails anti-realism about the reference of language.
Dummett’s most influential writings are the first and second editions of Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973–1981), The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy (1981), and the 'William James Lectures' that he delivered at Harvard in 1976 published in 1991 as The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. He also delivered a series of lectures at Bologna in 1987, published in 1988 as Origins of Analytical Philosophy. In 1991 he published a collections of papers on Frege; and in 1993 a collection entitled The Seas of Language.
Dummett was born in London in 1925 and attended prestigious boys’ schools in Wiltshire and Hampshire. Though he rejected religious belief in his youth, Dummett converted to Catholicism while serving in the armed forces during the Second World War. After his military service he went to Oxford University where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Christ Church College. He graduated in 1950 with first class honors and was awarded a fellowship at All Souls College. Throughout his acclaimed career Dummett remained associated with Oxford, though he has held visiting posts at several universities around the world. In 1962 he was appointed reader in the philosophy of mathematics at Oxford; in 1979 he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic, where he served as chair until his retirement in 1992. Dummett, along with his wife, has remained active in antiracist campaigns and political reforms, even placing his philosophical career on hold for several years during the sixties to pursue these causes. He received a knighthood in 1999.
Many of Britain’s leading analytic philosophers have been significantly influenced by Dummett, including Crispin Wright, Simon Blackburn, John McDowell, and Timothy Williamson — though none would be properly classed a disciple. Dummett’s most notable contributions have come in his analysis of theories of meaning accounting for communication, reason, and representation in language. His commitment to a kind of anti-realism in debates about reference and language, though often overstated, has been a point of particular interest for his admirers and detractors alike. Dummett was not satisfied with the pessimism of Wittgenstein and the holists who denied the possibility of finally understanding a language from within language. Dummett argues that an alternative can be found if one denies the principle of bivalence. Bivalence is the notion that every meaningful proposition is either true or false; and in Dummett’s view the denial of bivalence entails anti-realism about the reference of language.
Dummett’s most influential writings are the first and second editions of Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973–1981), The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy (1981), and the 'William James Lectures' that he delivered at Harvard in 1976 published in 1991 as The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. He also delivered a series of lectures at Bologna in 1987, published in 1988 as Origins of Analytical Philosophy. In 1991 he published a collections of papers on Frege; and in 1993 a collection entitled The Seas of Language.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 17, 2022
Getting this clear overview of exactly what Frege's intervention in philosophy at his time amounted to was quite breathtaking. Dummett is a great thinker, and these transcriptions of his lectures are equally lucid and detailed. His overall thesis is that Frege and Husserl both made a very similar, and radical, move in philosophy, in what subject matter we should take as foundational, and what the nature of that matter is -- but minute differences between them led Frege's work to unfold into analytic philosophy, while Husserl's unfolded into continental phenomenology. Dummett details the components of both Frege's and Husserl's views that are relevant to telling this story; and he spends additional detail and time upon explaining why the differences between Frege and Husserl yielded such different philosophical traditions, a striking difference in outcomes, unbeknownst to them at the time.
This was such a breathtaking read because in effect Dummett's book focuses on and makes explicit very deep-rooted assumptions in the history of philosophy, particularly in theorizing about the nature of meaning, and its relation to perception. To see the framework, that constrains how all other philosophers think and write, is breathtaking. And to see this also inspires the reader to think of which frameworks are better or worse; or what new possibilities for a framework could look like. In other words, Dummett hands us the good stuff here, the very deep stuff.
First, some side thoughts: I've read a bit of Frege a long time ago, but now I can see how profound and suggestive his ideas are, only after having learned some "continental" philosophy, and having received Dummett's guidance for comparing Frege with Husserl. Frege leaves much open as to what sense really is; the key points are that sense serves the role of fixing the referents of and determining the truth value of a thought. It's suggestive that sense could be related to the "lifeworld", qua meanings we spontaneously encounter, that we do not create through any deliberate mental activity, and that are fixed there by objective and social conditions that we do not control. If this is the right way to think about things, it's interesting to reconsider what truth and falsity amount to. If a sentence is true, it's because there's something in the lifeworld that provides its meaning and that 'exists' in the lifeword; but the ontology of the lifeword does not consist of low-level or physical objects alone. There are meanings and uses of objects. The reality or presence of these meanings in the lifeworld could make sentences about them true; but the truth here would have to be different from our sense of truth regarding sentences that make existential claims about physical objects. Such meanings of the lifeworld are contingent upon social practices over long periods of time. Moreover, to encounter them, perhaps we must interpret them, using concepts in our language.
In other words, it seems to me that Frege's framework opens way for discovering a more expansive sense of "truth" and "falsity" than our received notions which are based in classical logic and in the values of existential claims about physical objects.
Now, here's a summary of some of the ideas presented in these lectures. Dummett argues that the key distinguishing feature of 20th century analytic philosophy is that studying thought is foundational to all branches of philosophy, and an adequate account of thought can only be achieved through an adequate account of language. Logical positivists and ordinary language philosophers alike assumed this (e.g., Ayer, Quine, Davidson, late-Wittgenstein). Dummett argues that Frege was the very first to take the "linguistic turn." How did this position defining analytic philosophy as a whole follow from Frege's theory of meaning? Frege wanted to make thought separate from psychological mental contents. Thought is not a contingent, empirical matter, as sensations and other mental contents are. Instead, thought is objective and transcendent in a manner not totally unlike Kant's positing of transcendental conditions of experience. This allows for logic and theories of meaning, alike to be demarcated from psychology.
A crucial consequence of making thought objective, transcendent of the contingent realm of psychology, is that it protects us from the problem of other minds, and the related problem of skepticism that follows from "radical translation." A potential issue is: How can we know we're talking about the same things, when we use the same sentences? Once thought and language is objective, this objectivity can be understood as based in public or social conditions; and then we can think that our individual thoughts and cases of language use involve grasping at the objective thoughts out there. We can be more or less right, with respect to the gold standard of objective thoughts; and we can understand each other because usually we do grasp the same objective thoughts. So while some of us might have the stereotype that analytic philosophy fails to recognize intersubjectivity as preceding subjectivity, and this point is championed by mainly continental philosophy, it turns out Frege has his own claim that serves the same function as this point, even though his is distinct from it.
Frege held that the structure of a thought must be reflected in that of a sentence. Sentences express rather than merely encode thought, but we cannot understand the structure of a thought without appealing to that of verbal expression of it. To get a handle on the proper way to carve out the syntax of a sentence, we must know the sense or meaning of the sentence. The sense of a thought is precisely what makes the thought true or false. As proper nouns refer to objects in the world, thoughts refer to their truth values; the referent of a thought is its truth value, which is determined by its sense and what is actually the case. Sentences are also true or false, but only derivatively of the truth and falsity of the thoughts that they express.
On Frege's account, senses don't have references, because the notion of reference is conceptually and explanatorily prior to that of sense. So we must first know what it is for a sentence to be true (i.e., know what it is for it to have a reference), before we can know what it is for it to express a thought, or have a sense. This turns over an otherwise possibly intuitive order of these basic concepts. We might be tempted to think that meaning precedes truth; we first think about the meaning, and then we ask whether it is true. Frege reverses this; we must think about what a sentence refers to, what would make it true, in order to derive its meaning. Frege also holds that in principle we can have thoughts independently of language. Moreover, senses are objective entities, which exist independently of any human being.
This implies that in order to have a general theory of meaning and truth, we cannot simply define truth formally (as Tarski does), or presume we have a definition of truth and derive meaning from that (as Davidson does). We also need to have an account of the conceptual connection between meaning and truth, or how the meaning of a sentence can be determined by its truth conditions at all. Frege sketches a way forward on this issue: sentences consist in thoughts, which refer to their truth values; and truth value is fixed by the sense of the thought.
The analogue to the sense, for Husserl, is the noema. Both Husserl was influenced by Bretano, who proposed that consciousness is a matter of having mental states directed towards object. Mental phenomena have an intrinsic relation to objects. This leads us to the puzzle: how can we have meaningful and contentful mental states whose purported object fails to exist? This leads to Husserl to posit the noema. Frege independently arrived at the same puzzle, without being in contact with Bretano; and this led him to posit the sense. So Frege and Husserl share the same starting point; this puzzle of empty referring terms.
A noema is essentially, according to Dummett, a generalized sense. Sense is applicable to only linguistic meaning. Husserl's noema is applicable to that, but also to meaning as found in perceptual experience. Frege doesn't take sense to be real in the manner of being a physical object; but they are "actual" in the manner of being capable of standing in causal interactions with other entities. So empty referring expressions (e.g., "Frodo is hot") have objective or actual senses as their object, but lack any real referent in the world.
A key difference between the thinkers is that Husserl's notion of reference remains vague, whereas Frege's notion is built upon the functional requirement of reference to determine the truth value of the thought. This allows Frege to derive a systematic account of different types of entities that serve as referents to different types of expressions (e.g., sentences v. nouns); Husserl lacks this.
Another key difference between the thinkers is the Husserl thinks the meaning of a thought or perception is bestowed upon it by a mental act. Frege in contrast takes meanings, as senses, to be objective; we have to grasp them, and we can be wrong in grasping them. Moreover, Husserl thinks that noema, or his version of the sense, are "universal objects" - how do these relate to individual mental acts of imposing meaning" It can't be the relation between type to token, since this would make utterances primary in the order of explanation. That would allow for whatever the speaker means to convey will be the meaning possessed by the thought or sentence. This seems wrong; speaker intent can't determine the meaning of a sentence -- I can't use "Frodo" to refer to "Kant". So Husserl's account is faultier than Frege's in its failure to ward off this unsavory consequence.
An interesting consequence of Frege's account is that if a thought lacks a sense, and thus a referent, it cannot be true or false. This differs from other thinkers like Evans and Russell who think if a thought lacks a referent, it is plainly false. On Husserl's account, if we have an illusion that an object is there before us when it is not, the noema of that object which we grasp suffices to make this experience a perception of that object. This seems disanalogous to Frege's account, although the comparison is indirect, since one speaks of language, the other of perception.
Frege's account is very incomplete when it comes to understanding the role of sense in perceptual experience. Frege thinks we can apprehend meaning in perception only insofar as this is mediated by thoughts and their senses. A consequence of this is that nonlinguistic creatures would be incapable of having meaningful perceptions; that seems wrong. Moreover, what does it mean to grasp a sense at all, on Frege's account? He doesn't say. Dummett's reconstruction is that we usually understand language use without needing to explicitly attend to the meanings; this is a matter of our grasping a thought. When we do attend, when the circumstances demand for this, we activate our dispositions to grasp a sense, which is component of the thought.
Would highly recommend this book to readers interested in the differences and possible connections between "analytic" and "continental philosophical" traditions -- or who generally would enjoy having their deep presuppositions about how we should go about doing philosophy, which phenomena are fundamental and how we are to go about studying them, illuminated.
This was such a breathtaking read because in effect Dummett's book focuses on and makes explicit very deep-rooted assumptions in the history of philosophy, particularly in theorizing about the nature of meaning, and its relation to perception. To see the framework, that constrains how all other philosophers think and write, is breathtaking. And to see this also inspires the reader to think of which frameworks are better or worse; or what new possibilities for a framework could look like. In other words, Dummett hands us the good stuff here, the very deep stuff.
First, some side thoughts: I've read a bit of Frege a long time ago, but now I can see how profound and suggestive his ideas are, only after having learned some "continental" philosophy, and having received Dummett's guidance for comparing Frege with Husserl. Frege leaves much open as to what sense really is; the key points are that sense serves the role of fixing the referents of and determining the truth value of a thought. It's suggestive that sense could be related to the "lifeworld", qua meanings we spontaneously encounter, that we do not create through any deliberate mental activity, and that are fixed there by objective and social conditions that we do not control. If this is the right way to think about things, it's interesting to reconsider what truth and falsity amount to. If a sentence is true, it's because there's something in the lifeworld that provides its meaning and that 'exists' in the lifeword; but the ontology of the lifeword does not consist of low-level or physical objects alone. There are meanings and uses of objects. The reality or presence of these meanings in the lifeworld could make sentences about them true; but the truth here would have to be different from our sense of truth regarding sentences that make existential claims about physical objects. Such meanings of the lifeworld are contingent upon social practices over long periods of time. Moreover, to encounter them, perhaps we must interpret them, using concepts in our language.
In other words, it seems to me that Frege's framework opens way for discovering a more expansive sense of "truth" and "falsity" than our received notions which are based in classical logic and in the values of existential claims about physical objects.
Now, here's a summary of some of the ideas presented in these lectures. Dummett argues that the key distinguishing feature of 20th century analytic philosophy is that studying thought is foundational to all branches of philosophy, and an adequate account of thought can only be achieved through an adequate account of language. Logical positivists and ordinary language philosophers alike assumed this (e.g., Ayer, Quine, Davidson, late-Wittgenstein). Dummett argues that Frege was the very first to take the "linguistic turn." How did this position defining analytic philosophy as a whole follow from Frege's theory of meaning? Frege wanted to make thought separate from psychological mental contents. Thought is not a contingent, empirical matter, as sensations and other mental contents are. Instead, thought is objective and transcendent in a manner not totally unlike Kant's positing of transcendental conditions of experience. This allows for logic and theories of meaning, alike to be demarcated from psychology.
A crucial consequence of making thought objective, transcendent of the contingent realm of psychology, is that it protects us from the problem of other minds, and the related problem of skepticism that follows from "radical translation." A potential issue is: How can we know we're talking about the same things, when we use the same sentences? Once thought and language is objective, this objectivity can be understood as based in public or social conditions; and then we can think that our individual thoughts and cases of language use involve grasping at the objective thoughts out there. We can be more or less right, with respect to the gold standard of objective thoughts; and we can understand each other because usually we do grasp the same objective thoughts. So while some of us might have the stereotype that analytic philosophy fails to recognize intersubjectivity as preceding subjectivity, and this point is championed by mainly continental philosophy, it turns out Frege has his own claim that serves the same function as this point, even though his is distinct from it.
Frege held that the structure of a thought must be reflected in that of a sentence. Sentences express rather than merely encode thought, but we cannot understand the structure of a thought without appealing to that of verbal expression of it. To get a handle on the proper way to carve out the syntax of a sentence, we must know the sense or meaning of the sentence. The sense of a thought is precisely what makes the thought true or false. As proper nouns refer to objects in the world, thoughts refer to their truth values; the referent of a thought is its truth value, which is determined by its sense and what is actually the case. Sentences are also true or false, but only derivatively of the truth and falsity of the thoughts that they express.
On Frege's account, senses don't have references, because the notion of reference is conceptually and explanatorily prior to that of sense. So we must first know what it is for a sentence to be true (i.e., know what it is for it to have a reference), before we can know what it is for it to express a thought, or have a sense. This turns over an otherwise possibly intuitive order of these basic concepts. We might be tempted to think that meaning precedes truth; we first think about the meaning, and then we ask whether it is true. Frege reverses this; we must think about what a sentence refers to, what would make it true, in order to derive its meaning. Frege also holds that in principle we can have thoughts independently of language. Moreover, senses are objective entities, which exist independently of any human being.
This implies that in order to have a general theory of meaning and truth, we cannot simply define truth formally (as Tarski does), or presume we have a definition of truth and derive meaning from that (as Davidson does). We also need to have an account of the conceptual connection between meaning and truth, or how the meaning of a sentence can be determined by its truth conditions at all. Frege sketches a way forward on this issue: sentences consist in thoughts, which refer to their truth values; and truth value is fixed by the sense of the thought.
The analogue to the sense, for Husserl, is the noema. Both Husserl was influenced by Bretano, who proposed that consciousness is a matter of having mental states directed towards object. Mental phenomena have an intrinsic relation to objects. This leads us to the puzzle: how can we have meaningful and contentful mental states whose purported object fails to exist? This leads to Husserl to posit the noema. Frege independently arrived at the same puzzle, without being in contact with Bretano; and this led him to posit the sense. So Frege and Husserl share the same starting point; this puzzle of empty referring terms.
A noema is essentially, according to Dummett, a generalized sense. Sense is applicable to only linguistic meaning. Husserl's noema is applicable to that, but also to meaning as found in perceptual experience. Frege doesn't take sense to be real in the manner of being a physical object; but they are "actual" in the manner of being capable of standing in causal interactions with other entities. So empty referring expressions (e.g., "Frodo is hot") have objective or actual senses as their object, but lack any real referent in the world.
A key difference between the thinkers is that Husserl's notion of reference remains vague, whereas Frege's notion is built upon the functional requirement of reference to determine the truth value of the thought. This allows Frege to derive a systematic account of different types of entities that serve as referents to different types of expressions (e.g., sentences v. nouns); Husserl lacks this.
Another key difference between the thinkers is the Husserl thinks the meaning of a thought or perception is bestowed upon it by a mental act. Frege in contrast takes meanings, as senses, to be objective; we have to grasp them, and we can be wrong in grasping them. Moreover, Husserl thinks that noema, or his version of the sense, are "universal objects" - how do these relate to individual mental acts of imposing meaning" It can't be the relation between type to token, since this would make utterances primary in the order of explanation. That would allow for whatever the speaker means to convey will be the meaning possessed by the thought or sentence. This seems wrong; speaker intent can't determine the meaning of a sentence -- I can't use "Frodo" to refer to "Kant". So Husserl's account is faultier than Frege's in its failure to ward off this unsavory consequence.
An interesting consequence of Frege's account is that if a thought lacks a sense, and thus a referent, it cannot be true or false. This differs from other thinkers like Evans and Russell who think if a thought lacks a referent, it is plainly false. On Husserl's account, if we have an illusion that an object is there before us when it is not, the noema of that object which we grasp suffices to make this experience a perception of that object. This seems disanalogous to Frege's account, although the comparison is indirect, since one speaks of language, the other of perception.
Frege's account is very incomplete when it comes to understanding the role of sense in perceptual experience. Frege thinks we can apprehend meaning in perception only insofar as this is mediated by thoughts and their senses. A consequence of this is that nonlinguistic creatures would be incapable of having meaningful perceptions; that seems wrong. Moreover, what does it mean to grasp a sense at all, on Frege's account? He doesn't say. Dummett's reconstruction is that we usually understand language use without needing to explicitly attend to the meanings; this is a matter of our grasping a thought. When we do attend, when the circumstances demand for this, we activate our dispositions to grasp a sense, which is component of the thought.
Would highly recommend this book to readers interested in the differences and possible connections between "analytic" and "continental philosophical" traditions -- or who generally would enjoy having their deep presuppositions about how we should go about doing philosophy, which phenomena are fundamental and how we are to go about studying them, illuminated.
May 18, 2007
I like this book; it remains unique in comparison to other books that claim a similar project. I've read a couple other books that attempt to explain the "origins of analytic philosophy" (see Scott Soames or Herbert Hochberg), but what sets this text apart is its focus on continental origins. Both Soames & Hochberg limit their continental investigation to the philosophy of Frege while spending more time on the Cambridge school (G. E. Moore, B. Russell, early Wittgenstein...). M. Dummett expands his search to other key German & Austrian figures that most definitely contributed to the formation of the analytic tradition. Dummett not only spends time on Frege; he explores Husserl, Brentano, Meinong, Bolzano, and others as well. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, according to Dummett, really originates in certain Austrian intellectual circles of the late 19th century. Dummett's book is important and interesting for rightly stressing this point. Why is this fact largely unacknowledged? Dummett suggests the rise of Hitler as having something to do with it. Intellectual activity (along with the focus on such things) shifted (or was displaced) to the West as a result of the Third Reich. It's just another way that Nazi fascism devastated European culture and social life.
This book is also useful for its commentary & explanation on the analytic/continental split....There is alot of intelligent and perceptive insight on this issue.
Dummett is difficult but well worth the effort. Check it out.
This book is also useful for its commentary & explanation on the analytic/continental split....There is alot of intelligent and perceptive insight on this issue.
Dummett is difficult but well worth the effort. Check it out.
August 21, 2017
Dummett offers an elucidating and thorough account of the progress of philosophy from Brentano to the late Wittgenstein, proceeding mainly via juxtaposition of the work Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl. Well-researched and compelling (really what else do you expect from Dummett), the only complaint to be made about the work is that it is too partial. Views in accordance with Dummett's own are lauded, while those in opposition are dismissed with little ceremony. Overall though, an essential read for anyone interested in how Anglo-American philosophy came to be what it is today.
September 11, 2022
Dense and difficult but rewarding. Reading Dummett (or at least the two books I've read) is like looking at analytic philosophy from an alternate universe.
June 6, 2025
hayatımda okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan biri, zihnimi açtı
April 27, 2019
Analytic Philosophy
Dummett highlights the basic fact that in essence, Analytic(al) philosophy equates thought with language; that is all there is to it. For some reason, this piece of information escaped me for so many years, but I am glad to have read this book; I was blind but now I see.
Dummett highlights the basic fact that in essence, Analytic(al) philosophy equates thought with language; that is all there is to it. For some reason, this piece of information escaped me for so many years, but I am glad to have read this book; I was blind but now I see.
August 27, 2016
Gets better as it goes along, especially after the chapters dealing with Husserl, IMO.
Want to read
June 27, 2022History of philosophy
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews