Michael Dummett

Philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought.

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt (27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011) was a British philosopher in the analytic tradition, known most notably as an interpreter of Frege.

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• Philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought. It is for this reason and in this sense that philosophy is about the world.
  • Dummett, M. A. E. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991.

• Such were the lucidity of exposition and his mastery of the topic that it seems possible that, had he ever published it, the political theory of Britain would have been significantly different.
  • On Lewis Carroll's work on election theory; quoted in Robin Wilson, Lewis Carroll in Numberland (2008), p. vii

• ...the most interesting fact about the Tarot pack [is] that it is the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched: not by a very long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretations, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed.
  • Decker, Ronald; Depaulis, Thierry; Dummett, Michael. A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (1996), p. 27