Online research in philosophy

This is the first single-volume edition and translation of Frege's philosophical writings to include his seminal papers as well as substantial selections from ...

: Convinced that logic has a history and that its history always manages to surprise the philosophers, Claude Imbert has devoted much of her work to the study of the Stoic school and of the late-nineteenth-century German logician Gottlob Frege. In the fifth chapter of her book Pour une histoire de la logique, she examines the trajectory of Frege's awareness of what his new logic entails, in particular the way it subverts the project of Kant.

Russell, and his German predecessor Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). Logicism is the position in the philosophy of mathematics that mathematical truth is a species of logical truth.

The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way.

Frege and Eucken were colleagues in the faculty of philosophy at Jena University for more than 40 years. At times they had close scientific contacts. Eucken promoted Frege's career at the university. A comparison of Eucken's writings between 1878 and 1880 with Frege's writings shows Eucken to have had an important philosophical influence on Frege's philosophical development between 1879 and 1885. In particular the classification of the Begriffsschrift in the tradition of Leibniz is influenced by Eucken. Eucken also influenced Frege's choice of philosophical and logical terms. Finally, there are analogous positions concerning relations between concepts and their expressions in natural language, Frege was probably also influenced by Eucken's use of the term ?tone?. Eucken used Frege's arguments in his own fight against psychologism and empiricism.

This book aims to develop certain aspects of Gottlob Frege's theory of meaning, especially those relevant to intentional logic. It offers a new interpretation of the nature of senses, and attempts to devise a logical calculus for the theory of sense and reference that captures as closely as possible the views of the historical Frege.

Gottlob Frege has exerted an enormous influence on the evolution of twentieth-century philosophy, yet the real significance of that influence is still very much a matter of debate. This book provides a completely new and systematic account of Frege's philosophy by focusing on its cornerstone: the theory of sense and reference. Two features distinguish this study from other books on Frege. First, sense and reference are placed absolutely at the core of Frege's work; the author shows that no adequate account of the theory can avoid analysing the notion of thought that underpins it, or explaining how it has clarified our concept of judgement. Second, the theory is situated within the development of Frege's thought; the author reveals how the theory caused Frege to alter many of his fundamental views. In doing so the author presents a clearer picture of the problems the theory was intended to solve, and delineates more sharply the characteristic features of Frege's philosophy.

In an unpublished manuscript of 1914 titled ‘Logic in mathematics’, Gottlob Frege offered a rich account of the paradox of analysis. I argue that Frege there claims that the explicandum and explicans of a successful analysis express the same sense and that he furthermore appreciated that this requires that one cannot conclude that two sentences differ in sense simply because it is possible for a (minimally) competent speaker to accept one without accepting the other. I claim that this is shown by Frege’s suggestive remarks about a cloudy grasp of a sense. I then argue that this fact calls into question a key assumption behind Frege’s master argument for the sense/reference distinction.