Background
Wright, Crispin was born on December 21, 1942 in Bagshot, Surrey.
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Crispin Wright
Edit ProfileEducation
Trinity College, Cambridge, BA 1964, Manuscripts and Archives, PhD 1968. Christ Church. Oxford, BPhil 1969, DLitt 1988.
Career
Junior Research Fellow, Trinity College. Oxford, 1967-1969; Prize Fellow, All Souls. Oxford. 1969-1971; Lecturer, Balliol College, Oxford, 1969-1970.
Lecturer, University College, London, 1970-1971. Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford. 1971-1978; Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, University of St Andrews, 1978-1987.
Professor of Philosophy, (1992), Nelson Professor, University of Michigan.
Views
Whatever topic Wright addresses, the lynchpin of his work, following the lead of Dummett. is the ‘Realism/Anti-Realism'dispute. Wright painstakingly explores the nature and implications of adopting intuitionist logic and anti-realist semantics and has succeeded in sharpening the debate in many ways. He has not confined his attention to technical semantical and logical issues, but, going beyond attention to global realism and global anti-realism, has explored the past, other minds, etc., in the light of this overarching approach. Meaning, for Wright, must respect quasiverificationist constraints: the notion of truth deployed in a theory of meaning should not and cannot transcend possible evidence. Whilst addressing similar issues to those Dummett considers. Wright is suspicious of semantic monism and of seeing the Principle of Bivalence as crucial to acceptance/rejection of realism. In the philosophy of mathematics Wright broke with Dummett's reading of Frege and gave some defence of Frege’s 'Platonism’ whilst rejecting his ‘realism’, doctrines Dummett tied together. Wright has succeeded in helping Dummett force philosophers to reconsider their perhaps unthinking realism and to shift the axis of attention to metaphysics in a semantical direction. His work, notwithstanding the difficulty of the subject matter, has increasingly attracted high approbation.
