Ian Rumfitt

In July 2018 Rumfitt was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

Rumfitt's work in the philosophy of logic culminated in the publication of The Boundary Stones of Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015). This book presents a sustained defense of classical logic against such philosophers as Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright. What makes Rumfitt's defense unusual is that he joins Dummett and Wright in rejecting the principle of bivalence, the keystone of classical semantics. So Rumfitt presents and defends non-classical semantic theories for various problematical areas of discourse which nevertheless validate classical logic. The book also presents a solution to the Sorites paradox and a defense of Kripke–Platek set theory against the better-known Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory.

He delivered the Nelson Lectures in Philosophy at the University of Michigan in 2004. He was founding co-director of the Centre for Logic and Language within the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2001. Since January 2016 he has been one of the editors of Philosophers' Imprint.

He was educated at Victoria College, Jersey, at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was also a Junior Research Fellow, and at Princeton University. His graduate studies at Oxford were supervised by Sir Michael Dummett. He has taught at Keele University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University College, Oxford, where he served as a tutorial fellow from 1998 until 2005, Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was Professor of Philosophy from 2005 until 2013, and the University of Birmingham, where he was Professor of Philosophy from 2013 until 2016.