Frege (1)

Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician and rabid antisemite whose major contribution to philosophy was the invention of logical quantification, which formalized Aristotle's syllogistic logic and genus-species model of reasoning. Frege's reputation was revived by British philosophers under the influence of J.L. Austin, who translated Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. This group of so-called ordinary language philosophers was on the lookout for a rigorous alternative to the narrowly scientistic approach of Bertrand Russell and American positivists. They saw this alternative in Frege's notion of the meaning or sense of words which promised to be more flexible and less mechanistic than the Russellian alternative and so closer to natural human language. Frege would later become the hero of English Catholic philosophers like Peter Geach and Michael Dummett (who abjured Frege's antisemitism). These philosophers prized Frege's version of logic for its value in reviving scholastic speculation.

It is noteworthy that Frege died as late as 1925 since we tend to think of him as predating his contemporaries, Russell and Husserl. In fact, Frege's reputation has undergone some rather wild swings over the years. Early on he was undervalued, a chapter in Russell. These days, after Wittgenstein's philosophical hara kiri and the detection of multiple problems with Russell's grand attempt to synthesize symbolic logic, set theory and empiricism, Frege may be a bit overvalued. Nevertheless, his writings on logical grammar and the foundations of arithmetic deserve a permanent place in the philosophical syllabus.

Schriften zur Logic und Sprachphilosophie aus dem Nachlass

Frege and Pünjer on Existence

Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik

Funktion - Begriff - Bedeutung

Object Reference and Truth-Value Reference in Über  Sinn und Bedeutung

Begriffsschrift