Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Fichte and Schelling
- Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the ‘Doctrine of Essence’
- Schopenhauer's Pessimism
- Karl Marx
- Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry
- Bolzano, Brentano and Meinong: Three Austrian Realists
- Vorsprung durch Logik: The German Analytic Tradition
- German Philosophy of Mathematics from Gauss to Hilbert
- The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?
- Husserl's Concept of Being: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics
- Frege and the Later Wittgenstein
- Otto Neurath, the Vienna Circle and the Austrian Tradition
- Does the Nothing Noth?
- Reactionary Modernism
- Adorno on Disenchantment: The Scepticism of Enlightened Reason
- Habermas, Science and Modernity
- German Philosophy Today: Between Idealism, Romanticism, and Pragmatism
- The Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking
- Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy. Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn?
- Index of Names
Frege and the Later Wittgenstein
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Fichte and Schelling
- Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the ‘Doctrine of Essence’
- Schopenhauer's Pessimism
- Karl Marx
- Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry
- Bolzano, Brentano and Meinong: Three Austrian Realists
- Vorsprung durch Logik: The German Analytic Tradition
- German Philosophy of Mathematics from Gauss to Hilbert
- The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?
- Husserl's Concept of Being: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics
- Frege and the Later Wittgenstein
- Otto Neurath, the Vienna Circle and the Austrian Tradition
- Does the Nothing Noth?
- Reactionary Modernism
- Adorno on Disenchantment: The Scepticism of Enlightened Reason
- Habermas, Science and Modernity
- German Philosophy Today: Between Idealism, Romanticism, and Pragmatism
- The Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking
- Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy. Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn?
- Index of Names
Summary
Preliminaries
In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein acknowledged ‘Frege's great works’ as one of the two primary stimulations for his thoughts. Throughout his life he admired Frege both as a great thinker and as a great stylist. This much is indisputable. What is disputable is how he viewed his own philosophical work in relation to Frege's and, equally, how we should view his work in this respect. Some followers of Frege are inclined to think that Wittgenstein's work builds on or complements that of Frege. If that were true it would be plausible to suppose that the joint legacy of these two great philosophers can provide a coherent foundation for our own endeavours. But it is debatable whether their fundamental ideas can be synthesized thus. The philosophy of Wittgenstein, both early and late, is propounded to a very large extent in opposition to Frege's. They can no more be mixed than oil and water – or so I shall argue.
Frege's logical works did indeed stimulate the young Wittgenstein's thoughts. His formalization of the propositional and predicate calculi was the most momentous advance in formal logic since Aristotle. In many ways it, together with Russell's and Whitehead's Principia, set the agenda for twentieth-century philosophy of logic and for modern philosophical reflection on the relation between logical calculi, thought and language.
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- German Philosophy since Kant , pp. 223 - 248Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999