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Analytic philosophy--arguably one of the most important philosophical movements in the twentieth century--has gained a new historical self-consciousness, particularly about its own origins. Between 1880 and 1930, the most important work of its founding figures (Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein) not only gained attention but flourished. In this collection, fifteen previously unpublished essays explore different facets of this period, with an emphasis on the vital intellectual relationship between Frege and the early Wittgenstein. ... Read more

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This text argues that we must depart considerably from Frege's own views if we are to work towards an adequate conception of natural language. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) is considered the father of modern logic and one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy. He was first and foremost a mathematician, but his major works also made important contributions to the philosophy of language.

Frege’s writings are difficult and deal with technical, abstract concepts. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Frege On Sense and Reference helps the student to get to grips with Frege’s thought, and introduces and assesses:

• the background of Frege’s philosophical work
• Frege’s main papers and arguments, focussing on his distinction between sense and reference
• the continuing importance of Frege’s work to philosophy of logic and language.

Ideal for those coming to Frege for the first time, and containing fresh insights for anyone interested in his philosophy, this Guidebook is essential reading for all students of philosophy of language, philosophical logic and the history of analytic philosophy.

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Analytic philosophy has been the dominant philosophical perspective in the English speaking world in the second half of the 20th century. Grounded in the logical advances of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, analytic philosophy is characterized by logical precision, technical sophistication, and expositional clarity.

Recent work in the history of early analytic philosophy has shown that in a large part it developed in reaction against the critical thought of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. While the relationship between Kant and other major figures in early analytic philosophy, such as Russell, G. E. Moore, and Rudolf Carnap, has been the subject of full length studies, no such work yet exists on the relationship between Kant and Frege.

The Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Kant and Frege addresses this gap in our understanding of the origins of early analytic philosophy. Its concern is to chart the nature and significance of Frege's break with Kant over the question of whether arithmetic is a synthetic a priori or an analytic a priori science. In rejecting Kant's claim that arithmetic is an a priori synthetic science, Frege returns to a conception of the scope and power of pure reason that shows important similarities to the philosophical outlook of Kant's great predecessor and philosophical opponent Gottfried Leibniz. Here, Delbert Reed shows how, in his attempts to establish the foundations of arithmetic on analytic principles, Frege developed many of the tools, concerns and problems that would dominate the development of analytic philosophy in the 20th century. As such, this book makes a crucial contribution to the study of the history of early analytic philosophy. ... Read more

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For many philosophers, modern philosophy begins in 1879 with the publication of Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift, in which Frege presents the first truly modern logic in his symbolic language, Begriffsschrift, or concept-script. Danielle Macbeth's book, the first full-length study of this language, offers a highly original new reading of Frege's logic based directly on Frege's own two-dimensional notation and his various writings about logic.

Setting out to explain the nature of Frege's logical notation, Macbeth brings clarity not only to Frege's symbolism and its motivation, but also to many other topics central to his philosophy. She develops a uniquely compelling account of Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction, a distinction central to an adequate logical language; and she articulates a novel understanding of concepts, both of what they are and of how their contents are expressed in properly logical language. In her reading, Frege's Begriffsschrift emerges as a powerful and deeply illuminating alternative to the quantificational logic it would later inspire.

The most enlightening examination to date of the developments of Frege's thinking about his logic, this book introduces a new kind of logical language, one that promises surprising insight into a range of issues in metaphysics and epistemology, as well as in the philosophy of logic.

Customer Reviews (3)

Not a beginning logic student's book
Of course I didn't see the author's preface: "Although this is a book about Frege's logic, it is not a work of logic in any standard sense....My aim is rather to develop a novel reading of Frege's logical language...."With this in mind the title of her book should have been "Frege's logic: an examination of his notation."I'm a third of the way in and all I get is information on Frege's bizarre logic notation.I'm no scholar of logic.I want to understand Frege's logic as it relates to his contribution to the development of symbolic logic over the years.I wanted to know a bit about his influence on Godel and such.One book I have says that although Russell found a problem in Frege's work, which Frege found totally demoralizing, there are various "fixes" for what they call the Russell Antimony.Okay, what are these "fixes"?I won't find out in this book, I'm sure.

a Technically Sound and Accessible History
Danielle Macbeth's book tells a thorough and accessible history of the development of Frege's logic which builds up a novel interpretation of that logic.The work is the result of her years as a professor of analytic philosophy at Haverford College.

Traditional interpretations of Frege's work typically dismiss his logic as a failed attempt to do what Russell later did properly (even though neither Frege nor Russell appear to have believed such a thing). Frege's notation has several oddities, most prominently its 2-dimensional notation (rather than the 1-dimension of text). The traditional claim that Frege was trying to achieve the same ends as Russell do not account for these features of his logic. Such accounts also fail to explain many of the claims Frege made in letters he exchanged with Russell (and others) during the logic's development.Many of these claims are quite surprising and make no sense if you try to force Frege into the mould of Russell's logic.

Macbeth provides an alternative interpretation of Frege's logic, which accounts for its notation, Frege's claims about it, and the history of its development. She gives an integrated account of the development of the logic, and how it coincided with other developments in mathematics and logic. Frege's logic is actually quite interesting, and assigns subtly different meanings to logical implication and to the existential quantifier as compared to Russell's logic.

Her work is presented as a historical story, not a logic textbook, and should be read from the beginning rather than in fragments.She does not presume a knowledge of relevant history, philosophy, or logic -- she does an excellent job of explaining precisely those pieces that you need to to know in order to understand her explanation.Concequently, the book may omit your favorite piece of logical history, although I found it quite a relief to read a focused account rather than one which attempted to cover everything.As a result, it is accessible to readers without extensive background in the area, while still accurate and scholarly.It has depth rather than breadth.

Insufficient historical perspective
Two important books have been published in the last fifteen years, both of which have implications for any discussion of Frege: A. Garciadiego, BERTRAND RUSSELL AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES (1992), and I. Grattan-Guinness, THE SEARCH FOR MATHEMATICAL ROOTS (2000).

Macbeth's book refers to neither of these works.The result is that she marginalizes her own book.Most glaringly, she grants some logical content to Russell's paradox, and so messes up a discussion of the famous interaction of Russell and Frege.This is one historical episode you don't want to get wrong, but she does.She hasn't read Garciadiego, so she doesn't realize that Russell's "paradox" is a meaningless formulation, devoid of logical content.

Because her work is not grounded in math history at all, she also fails to put Frege's ideas in context.Whatever the different ideas of Dedekind, Russell, Frege or Cantor, they all come out of a very ancient mathematical school of "natural" mathematics.This approach--which never manages to form a logical part of any mathematical argument--seeks to "avoid" or "solve" paradoxes.Macbeth has missed the bus, in that she isn't aware that the most important work going on now in philosophy and mathematics is the reexamination of these paradoxes.Garciadiego famously began this work, drawing up a "list" in his book of nonexistent paradoxes, Russell's, Richard's, Burali-Forti's, Cantor's.Among other things, it has destroyed Godel's theorem, which relies--for its distinction between truth and provability--on Richard's paradox having at least some logical content.Richard's paradox has no logical content whatsoever.

This movement has proved so disturbing that it has brought substantive work to a halt, in both philosophy and mathematics, while we see where we are (if we're anywhere!).

And math and philosophy are not the only disciplines which have been brought to a halt."Natural" mathematics lies at the heart of Sraffa, Kimura, chemistry (in ways which are just beginning to be revealed) and even Einstein, who bought into the "natural" math polemics of a book for which he had high regard, Poincare's SCIENCE AND HYPOTHESIS.Where is it in the relativity of simultaneity?Here:

Up to now our considerations have been referred to a particular body of reference, which we have styled a 'railway embankment.' We suppose a very long train travelling along the rails with the constant velocity v and in the direction indicated....People travelling in this train will with advantage use the train as a rigid reference-body (co-ordinate system); they regard all events in reference to the train. Then every event which takes place along the line also takes place at a particular point of the train. Also the definition of simultaneity can be given relative to the train in exactly the same way as with respect to the embankment. As a natural consequence, however, the following question arises: Are two events (e.g. the two strokes of lightning A and B) which are simultaneous with reference to the railway embankment also simultaneous relatively to the train? We shall show directly that the answer must be in the negative. When we say that the lightning strokes A and B are simultaneous with respect to the embankment, we mean: the rays of light emitted at the places A and B, where the lightning occurs, meet each other at the mid-point M of the length A -> B of the embankment. But the events A and B also correspond to positions A and B on the train. Let M' be the mid-point of the distance A -> B on the travelling train. Just when the flashes (as judged from the embankment) of lightning occur, this point M' naturally coincides with the point M, but it moves towards the right in the diagram with the velocity v of the train.

This translation is accurate (the French and Italian are not). Einstein really does say "fallt zwar...zusammen." That is, he says that one point "naturally" coincides with another. The "naturally" reveals the intuitionist expression of the concept, for it reflects the belief that the formulations of geometry do not express facts.

Obviously, the logical problem with it is that, regardless of what Einstein may "feel" about mathematical expressions, nowhere in Einstein's writings--either in the 1905 papers or after--is any meaning assigned to 'naturally.' The failure to do so, destroys the idea, and it is easy to see why. If we retain the concept without meaning there is no logical basis on which to proceed beyond it. If we eliminate it, we wind up with a contradiction: the two assumed coordinate systems collapse into one. What is more, when we place this train experiment next to the various other thought experiments, we see that they are simply translations of the same problem into other terms, just as the false 'paradoxes' turn out to be subject to the same problem Richard indicated (reference to an infinite domain which destroys the meaning). In special relativity, natural coincidence can only be defined by infinitely many words. So the distinction collapses.

Macbeth knows none of this.Typical scholar so deeply into her subject that she loses track of her object. ... Read more

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Gottlob Frege's Uber Sinn und Bedeutung (`OnSense and Reference'), has come to be seen, in the century since itspublication in 1892, as one of the seminal texts of analyticphilosophy. It, along with the rest of Frege's writings on logic andmathematics, came to mark out a whole new domain of inquiry. Thisvolume bears witness to the continuing importance and influence ofthat agenda. It contains original papers written by leading Fregescholars for the conference held in 1992 in Karlovy Vary to celebratethe publication of Frege's essay. The fourteen essays show how thequestions Frege discusses in that essay connect intimately with issuesmuch debated in current philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. ... Read more