Crispin Wright

Who is Crispin Wright?

Crispin James Garth Wright is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity.

He was born in Surrey and was educated at Birkenhead School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in Moral Sciences in 1964 and taking a PhD in 1968. He took an Oxford BPhil in 1969 and was elected Prize Fellow and then Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he worked until 1978. He then moved 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. 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 at the University of Aberdeen.

In the philosophy of mathematics, he is best known for his book Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects, where he argues that Frege's logicist project could be revived by removing the Principle of Unrestricted Comprehension from the formal system. Arithmetic is then derivable in second-order logic from Hume's principle. He gives informal arguments that Hume's principle plus second-order logic is consistent, and from it one can produce the Dedekind–Peano axioms. Both results were proven informally by Gottlob Frege, 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 Hale. He has also written Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Mathematics.