Day 133 - Ave Maria

I have been reading Michael Dummett's "Frege: Philosophy of Language" for the past...hour and a half, it seems, which has resulted in a sore neck and a contemplative mood. Part of my recent revision efforts has been a resolution to tackle Dummett's two mammoth works on Frege (the other is called Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics).

Considering Frege is only 2/3 of one of my six papers, this may be a poor balance of my priorities. I maintain, however, that thinking deeply about such issues makes me a better philosopher generally - indeed, a better thinker generally.

If anyone wants to think properly about Frege's work, I strongly recommend Dummett - though not, perhaps, as an introduction level book. Seriously, though, Dummett is a very clever and insightful chap. According to Wikipedia, he is also an emiment scholar on the history of Tarot. Cooooool.

I will now quote a bit from his Preface:

"There is also a quite different reason why I have taken so long [to write this book]...I conceived it my duty to involve myself actively in opposition to the racism which was becoming more and more manifest in English life...I make no apology for this decision, nor do I regret it. Bertrand Russell, in a television interview given shortly before his death, was asked whether he thought that the political work on which he was engaged at the end of his life was of more importance than the philosophical and mathematical work he had done earlier. He replied, 'It depends how successful the political work is: if it succeeds, it is of much more importance than the other; but, if it does not, it is just silly.'...It was only at the stage at which, outwitted by those who could, after all, draw on a long tradition of the tactics of handling subjugated populations, I felt that I no longer had any very significant contribution to make, that I thought myself justified in returning to writing about more abstract matters of much less importance to anyone's happiness or future."

and

"There is some irony for me in the fact that the man about whose philosophical views I have devoted, over years, a great deal of time to thinking, was, at least at the end of his life, a virulent racist, specifically an anti-semite. This fact is revealed by a fragment of a diary which survives among Frege's Nachlass...shows Frege to been a man of extreme right-wing political opinions, bitterly opposed to the parliamentary system, democrats, liberals, Catholics, the French and, above all, Jews, who he thought ought to be deprived of political rights and, preferably, expelled from Germany. When I first read that diary, many years ago, I was deeply shocked, because I had revered Frege as an absolutely rational man, if, perhaps, not a very likeable one. I regret that the editors of Frege's Nachlass chose to suppress that particular item. From it I learned something about human beings which I should be sorry not to know; perhaps something about Europe, also."

I agree. I too revere Frege as an absolutely rational man, and I was deeply shocked when I read that. I learnt something that I am sorry to be true; but I should be sorry not to know it.

Back to 'more abstract matters' now.