Thursday, January 5, 2012

Michael Dummett

The British philosopher Michael Dummett's books The Logical Basis of Metaphysics and Frege: Philosophy of Language were some of the most useful books I read during my degree. His analysis of Frege's sense-reference distinction has been very helpful to my understanding of dependent type theory, and his explanation of intuitionism was quite helpful in understanding the relationship between the structural-proof-theoretic view of types and the realizability interpretation of types.

So I was disappointed to learn that he died last week, but pleased  to read the reminiscences of him by his colleagues posted on the New York Times.