PDF《voting analysis and beyond》

d forgotten a large amount of the history that I'

d learnt at school, so I thought it would be a mistake to read history, and I decided to read philos- ophy, politics and economics. I'

d read a little philosophy and been interested in it, but not yet gripped by it, and I thought it would be very useful to know both politics and economics. I was absolutely gripped by the philosophy that I studied as an undergraduate, and that became my overriding interest. It was analytic philosophy that was absolutely dominant in Oxford, and indeed throughout Britain I think at that time, so that was the Date: August 2005. The authors gratefully acknowledge that work on this paper was partly supported by the Leverhulme Trust (Grant F/07-004M). We would like to thank Liz Docherty who remarkably made the basic tape transcription.

1 All footnotes and references have been added by the interviewers. For Dummett'

s works in philosophy and logic see Dummett (1978, 1981, 1981a, 1991, 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1993a, 2000, 2004, 2005).

1 2 RUDOLF FARA AND MAURICE SALLES kind of philosophy I learnt to do. I'

ve always remained an analytic philosopher―but as for logic and the philosophy of mathematics, that'

s a separate thing. It happened, well again, quite accidentally. I took, the ?rst time it was set, an optional paper in philosophy in my ?nal examination. It was one invented by John Austin and it was called, absurdly, The Origins of Modern Epistemology. What it was was a collection (a rather large col- lection) of texts, starting with Plato'

s Theaetetus and ?nishing with Frege'

s Foundations of Arithmetic. These were texts which one wouldn'

t normally have come across during the ordinary Philosophy, Politics and Economics course in Oxford, and I worked my way through these. I was very interested by a lot of them but I was absolutely bowled over by the Foundations of Arithmetic, and I thought, I want to read everything this man has written. I thought it was the most brilliant work of its length, that I had ever come across. So when I got elected as a prize fellow of All Souls College I started to read everything that Frege had written. Very little was translated into English at that time, so I had to read it in German, and naturally since he was the founder of modern mathematical logic and a lot of his writing was about logic in general, philosophical logic, but also it all was directed at the philosophy of mathematics, so I decided I must learn some mathematics and some mathematical logic. Well, as far as mathematics was concerned, I planned to do an undergraduate course in mathematics and to take the ?nal examination, but the Warden of All Souls―I mean in those days such ?gures had much more authority than they do now, you did what they said―forbade me to read the Mathematics School, on the grounds that if I didn'

t get a ?rst class degree in the subject, i........