Ian Dunbar's Philosophy Home Page

This web site consists of a series of linked essays which present my philosophical ideas. It is organised as follows.

These essays are very much reports of work in progress. At the present time only 7 of the planned 30 essays have been completed and placed in this site. More will be added as and when they are completed.

Fundamentals All of these essays are informed by my agreement with Dummett on the central role of Frege's thought in modern philosophy. Dummett says:

"... in concentrating so single-mindedly on the area in which he worked, Frege also gave to it a central place in philosophy; and, in doing this, he achieved a revolution as overwhelming as that of Descartes."
(Dummett: "Frege, Philosophy of Language", 1st Edition, p665)

Elsewhere Dummett conjectures that Frege provided philosophy with that which it lacked for so long, namely a central organising methodology.

"Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and, finally, that the only proper method for analysing thought consists in the analysis of language."
(Dummett: "Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be", in "Truth and Other Enigmas", p458)

I agree with the conjecture that all philosophy is in vain if not carried out within a Fregean framework. Accordingly the Fundamentals section of this site is concerned with setting out what this framework consists in. I can not begin to pretend that I have done other than to skate across the surface of Frege's Philosophy of Thought (Dummett's term). My objective is not to probe deeply into the framework, but to use it in subsequent philosophical investigations.

The Realm of Sense A central feature of Frege's Philosophy of Thought is his division of the notion of the meaning of expressions into sense and reference. Moreover, for Frege the possible senses of expressions constitute an objective realm of their own. The essays in this section will explore the plausibility of this assertion and some of its consequences. In particular pure mathematics is identified with the Science of Sense, that is, pure mathematics is to the realm of sense what science is to the realm of reference.

The Realm of Reference This is just another name for the objective, external world, the world that language is designed to talk about. The essays in this section look at what conceptual machinery we need to speak about this world, particularly as it has been revealed to us by modern physics.

The Realm of Value These essays will go beyond matters of fact, exploring instead what it is to be a person and the intrinsically valuational content of our existence.