Gottlob Frege

1848-1925 · German · Logic, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Mind

We must ask for the meaning of a word only in the context of a sentence, never in isolation.

Gottlob Frege spent his career in quiet obscurity at the University of Jena, publishing work so technically demanding that almost no one read it in his lifetime. What he was building was the foundation of modern logic — and the conceptual skeleton of analytic philosophy. Without him there is no truth-functional analysis of language, perhaps no computer science in its modern form.

Topics Gottlob Frege addresses

• sense and reference
• the cognitive significance puzzle
• thoughts as abstract objects
• the third realm
• truth-values as references of sentences
• the concept-object distinction
• the unsaturatedness of concepts
• the concept horse paradox
• the function-argument analysis
• quantifiers and bound variables
• the context principle
• anti-psychologism
• logicism
• the reduction of arithmetic to logic
• hume's principle
• basic law v
• russell's paradox
• value-ranges
• extensions of concepts
• the definition of number
• multiple generality
• the judgement-stroke
• assertion and force
• indirect reference

Converse with Gottlob Frege on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Gottlob Frege's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.