Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett is perhaps the most important philosopher of logic of the second half of the twentieth century. Born on June 27, 1925, in London, England, Dummett completed his formal education at Christ Church, Oxford, and served for many years on the faculty of that university. A fellow of All Soul's College from 1979 to 1992, Dummett was the Wykeham Professor of Logic. His influential work has made commonplace (though not uncontroversial) the claim that philosophical matters concerning logic and truth are central to metaphysics, understood in roughly the traditional sense. Dummett has profoundly and permanently shifted the ground of debates concerning metaphysical realism.

Much of Dummett's work has taken place in the context of his commentaries on Gottlob Frege, at whose hands, Dummett claims, epistemology was supplanted by the philosophy of language as the fundamental field of philosophical investigation. Frege's reorientation...