| Michael Dummett |
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In 1944 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church , and remains a practising Catholic. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford , and was awarded a fellowship at All Souls College . In 1979, he became Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, a post he held until retiring in 1992. He received a Knighthood in 1999. WORK IN PHILOSOPHY His work on the German philosopher . In his 1963 paper ''Realism'' he popularised a controversial approach to understanding the historical dispute between Realist and other non-realist schools of philosophy such as idealism, nominalism, etc. He characterized all of these latter positions as Anti-realist and argued that the fundamental disagreement between realist and anti-realist was over the nature of truth. He has claimed that realism is best understood as accepting the classical characterisation of truth as bivalent and evidence-transcendent, while anti-realism rejects this in favor of a concept of knowable truth. Historically, these debates had been understood as disagreements about whether a certain type of entity objectively exists or not. Thus, we may speak of (anti-)realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as Natural Numbers ), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as, at base, analogous to the dispute between Intuitionism and Platonism in the Philosophy Of Mathematics . ACTIVISM Dummett has been politically active, through his work as a campaigner against racism. He let his philosophical career stall in order to influence civil rights for minorities during what he saw as a crucial period of reform in the late 1960s . He also has worked on the theory of voting, which led to his introduction of the Quota Borda System . He has written of his shock on finding anti-Semitic opinions in Frege, to whose work he had devoted such a high proportion of his professional career. TAROT Michael Dummett is also a leading historian in the research of the . REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
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