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13 - Frege and Russell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

Tom Ricketts
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Michael Potter
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Frege and Russell are often linked, as the founders of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Besides this historical, retrospective, connection, there are also important similarities in doctrine between them. Each was a logician, whose work in logic was closely integrated with his work in philosophy; each held that philosophical problems can be clarified and, in some cases, solved, by means of logic. (This view that the technical and the philosophical are not distinct is characteristic of one clear line of thought in twentieth-century analytic philosophy.) Each argued for, and tried to prove, logicism, the thesis that arithmetic can be reduced to logic, and is thus no more than logic in disguise. Each was strongly opposed to psychologism; each believed in a 'third realm', neither physical nor mental, which provides the subject matter for objective judgements about abstract matters. (In Frege's case, however, it is perhaps unclear just what this belief comes to.) In particular, each believed that our declarative sentences have an objective content, independent of human action - that, as Frege puts it, there is not my Pythagorean theorem and your Pythagorean theorem but the Pythagorean theorem, independent of both of us, and timelessly true. (Russell to some extent backs away from this view after 1906, as we shall see; the shift, however, has relatively little effect on the issues I shall be discussing in this essay.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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