Surrey-born philosopher *loves* Grice

Speranza

Crispin Wright was born somewhere in Surrey sometime [Dec. 21, if you must] in 1942.

He is regarded as a British philosopher.

He has written on neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity.

Crispin Wright was born somewhere in Surrey.

---- vide Grice, WoW:ii.

A: Where were you born?
B: Somewhere in Surrey.

---

Crispin Wright was educated at Birkenhead School (1950–61) and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in Moral Sciences in 1964 and taking a PhD in 1968.

We wouldn't be discussing Wright if he had not taken an Oxford BPhil in 1969.

Naturally enough, Wright was then elected a Prize Fellow and then Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he worked until 1978.

He then moved, alas -- the Oxonian Griceians sigh -- to the University of St. Andrews, where he was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics and then the first Bishop Wardlaw University Professorship in 1997.

As of fall 2008, he is professor at New York University (NYU), in Manhattan.

He has also taught at the University of Michigan, Oxford University, Columbia University, and Princeton University.

Crispin Wright is founder and director of Arché, which he left in September 2009 to take up leadership of the new Northern Institute of Philosophy (NIP) at the University of Aberdeen.

In the philosophy of mathematics, he is best-known for his book Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (1983), where he argues that Frege's logicist project could be revived by removing the Principle of Unrestricted Comprehension (sometimes referred to as Basic Law V) from the formal system.

Arithmetic is then derivable in second-order logic from Hume's principle.

Wright gives informal arguments that

(i) Hume's principle plus second-order logic is consistent, and

(ii) from it one can produce the Dedekind–Peano axioms.

Both results were proven informally by Gottlob Frege (Frege's Theorem), and would later be more rigorously proven by George Boolos and Richard Heck.

Wright is one of the major proponents of neo-logicism, alongside his frequent collaborator Bob (also known as "Robert" to his more formal friends) Hale.

Wright has also written on Wittgenstein (whom Grice calls a "minor figure" in the philosophical firmament, "along with Bosanquet and Wollaston"): Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Mathematics (1980).

In general metaphysics, his most important work is Truth and Objectivity (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Wright argues in this book that there need be no single, discourse-invariant thing in which truth consists, making an analogy with identity.

There need only be some principles regarding how the truth predicate can be applied to a sentence, some 'platitudes' about true sentences.

Wright also argues that in some contexts, probably including moral contexts,

superassertibility

will effectively function as a truth predicate. He defines a predicate as superassertible if and only if it is "assertible" in some state of information and then remains so no matter how that state of information is enlarged upon or improved.

Assertiveness is warrant by whatever standards inform the discourse in question.

Many of his most important papers in philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophical logic, meta-ethics, and the interpretation of Wittgenstein have been collected in two volumes published by Harvard University Press.

Awards

FBA: Fellow of the British Academy, 1992 -- so was Grice. So was Dummett, but he resigned even if he was later re-elected.

FRSE: Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1996

Fulbright scholar at Princeton University, 1985-6

Leverhulme Trust Personal Research Professor, 1998–2003

British Academy Research Reader, 1990-2

Prize Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, 1969–71

Extract from The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British
Philosophers

Persondata
Name Wright, Crispin
Alternative names
Short description British philosopher
Date of birth December 21, 1942
Place of birth Surrey, England
Date of death
Place of death
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Crispin_Wright&oldid=466405957"
View page ratingsRate this page
Rate this page
Page ratings
What's this?Current average ratings.
Trustworthy

Objective

Complete

Categories: Fulbright Scholars1942 birthsLiving people20th-century philosophersAnalytic philosophersBritish philosophersPhilosophers of mathematicsEpistemologists21st-century philosophersFellows of the British AcademyPhilosophers of languageAcademics of the University of St AndrewsFellows of the Royal Society of EdinburghOld Birkonians