Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Understanding Frege’s project
- 3 Frege’s conception of logic
- 4 Dummett’s Frege
- 5 What is a predicate?
- 6 Concepts, objects and the Context Principle
- 7 Sense and reference: the origins and development of the distinction
- 8 On sense and reference: a critical reception
- 9 Frege and semantics
- 10 Frege’s mathematical setting
- 11 Frege and Hilbert
- 12 Frege’s folly: bearerless names and Basic Law V
- 13 Frege and Russell
- 14 Inheriting from Frege: the work of reception, as Wittgenstein did it
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List
13 - Frege and Russell
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2010
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Understanding Frege’s project
- 3 Frege’s conception of logic
- 4 Dummett’s Frege
- 5 What is a predicate?
- 6 Concepts, objects and the Context Principle
- 7 Sense and reference: the origins and development of the distinction
- 8 On sense and reference: a critical reception
- 9 Frege and semantics
- 10 Frege’s mathematical setting
- 11 Frege and Hilbert
- 12 Frege’s folly: bearerless names and Basic Law V
- 13 Frege and Russell
- 14 Inheriting from Frege: the work of reception, as Wittgenstein did it
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List
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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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Frege , pp. 509 - 549Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010