Crispin Wright - Definition and Overview

Crispin 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, skepticism, knowledge and objectivity. He is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews.

His best-known work is probably Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (1983), where he argues that Frege's logicist project could be revived by removing Basic Law (V) from the formal system. Arithmetic is then derivable in second-order logic from Hume's principle. He 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 later to be proven more rigorously by George Boolos and Richard Heck.

He recently co-edited the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language, with Bob Hale.