Repository | Book | Chapter

According to Michael Dummett, the "fundamental principle of analytical philosophy is the priority, in the order of explanation, of language over thought: the only route to a philosophical account of thought is through an analysis of its expression in words or symbols, that is, a theory of linguistic meaning' (1991a, p. 17). In Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (1991a) — and to a lesser extent in Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993) — Dummett helps to build the case for this characterization of the analytical tradition through critical engagement with the Frege-Husserl exchange on number and arithmetic. My intention in this chapter is to demonstrate the significance of the Frege-Husserl exchange for Dummett's understanding of the analytical tradition in philosophy. The first section, "Frege's great leap forward', places Dummett's advocacy of Frege's critique of Husserl in the context of Frege's three fundamental principles from the introduction of the Grundlagen (1884). In the second section, "Husserl's project in the philosophy of mathematics', I attempt to demonstrate that Husserl's early work on number and arithmetic is concerned with a closely related, but also in some ways divergent, set of concerns from those found in Frege's contemporaneous work. This sets the scene for an assessment, in the third section, "Dummett's critique of Husserl's philosophy of arithmetic revisited', of the significance of the Frege-Husserl debate on arithmetic and number for Dummett's interpretation of the analytical tradition.

Full citation: