Background
Sommers, Frederic Tamler was born on January 1, 1923 in New York City.
Sommers, Frederic Tamler was born on January 1, 1923 in New York City.
Columbia University.
1955 63, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, then (1961) City College of the City University of New York. From 1963, Associate Professor, then (1966) Professor of Philosophy, Brandeis University.
Sommers has always thought of his work as an ‘Aristotelian development’. In the 1950s and early 1960s his interests were focused upon the logical constraints on linguistic competence and how they are embodied in natural language. In a remarkable paper, he sought to reinstate ‘the old Russell programme for an ontology which is defined by a logically correct language’, maintaining that ‘linguistic structures and ontological structures are isomorphic' and that ‘all languages have the same ontological structure in an important sense’. In the late 1960s Sommers started work on the logical syntax of natural languages, in opposition to current logic which uses a syntax of an artificial language. Thus he controversially proclaims the truth of ‘term logic’, where terms are the fundamental units and seeks to vindicate and restore the pre-Fregean traditional theory of predication. His main thesis is that, contrary to what is now commonly believed by logicians, singular and general statements do not differ in logical form. In other words, both singular and general statements can be viewed as categoricals, as sentences predicating a predicate of a subject. Sommers’ plan to rehabilitate traditional logic in the face of the diversity of modern logic has been criticized as ‘retrogressive’ by Angelelli (1982). But it has been defended by Englebretsen (1981).