Frege E-Book

Harold W. Noonan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 486

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This new book offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to Frege's remarkable philosophical work, examining the main areas of his writings and demonstrating the connections between them.

Frege's main contribution to philosophy spans philosophical logic, the theory of meaning, mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics. The book clearly explains and assesses Frege's work in these areas, systematically examining his major concepts, and revealing the links between them. The emphasis is on Frege's highly influential work in philosophical logic and the theory of meaning, including the features of his logic, his conceptions of object, concept and function, and his seminal distinction between sense and reference.

Frege will be invaluable for students of the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy.

Leseprobe

Frege

A Critical Introduction

Harold W. Noonan

Polity

Copyright © Harold W. Noonan 2001

The right of Harold W. Noonan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2001 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0-7456-1672-0

ISBN 0-7456-1673-9 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

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Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

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Key Contemporary Thinkers

Published

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction

Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction

Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction

Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty

Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship

Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience and Reality

Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics

Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction

Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-Modernism and Beyond

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics

James McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind, and Politics

Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction

Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

Harold W. Noonan, Frege: A Critical Introduction

William Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction

John Preston, Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society

Susan Sellers, Héléne Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography and Love

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason

James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State

Forthcoming

Maria Baghramian, Hilary Putnam

Sara Beardsworth, Kristeva

Mark Cain, Fodor: Language, Mind and Philosophy

James Carey, Innis and McLuhan

Rosemary Cowan, Cornell West: The Politics of Redemption

George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Pluralism and Liberalism

Thomas D’Andrea, Alasdair MacIntyre

Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias

Jocelyn Dunphy, Paul Ricoeur

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett

Nigel Gibson, Frantz Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett: Philosophy of Language

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Keith Hart, C. L. R. James

Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction

Paul Kelly, Ronald Dworkin

Carl Levy, Antonio Gramsci

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

Nick Smith, Charles Taylor

Nicholas Walker, Heidegger

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

1    Introduction: Frege’s Life and Work

Biography

The Origin and Development of Frege’s Philosophy

Frege’s Contributions to Philosophy

2    Logic

The Purpose of Conceptual Notation

Logic before Frege

Fregean Logic

3    Number

Aims of The Foundations of Arithmetic

Rebuttal of Earlier Attempts

The Development of Frege’s Own Position

4    Philosophical Logic

‘Function and Concept’

‘On Concept and Object’

5    Theory of Meaning

The Distinction between Sense and Reference

Indirect Reference

The Objectivity of Sense

Challenges to Sense

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

Preface

In this book I present a study of the most important themes in the work of the great German philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege. The exposition follows the order in which these themes appear in Frege’s work. Thus, after an introductory chapter outlining the background to Frege’s thought and setting him in the context of his time, the second chapter explains his fundamental advances in logic, as found in his first book, Conceptual Notation. The third chapter is devoted to his discussion of number in his masterpiece, The Foundations of Arithmetic, and its successor The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, including an account of the inconsistency discovered in his system by Bertrand Russell, ‘Russell’s Paradox’. The remaining two chapters are concerned with the most significant and influential of his writings on philosophical logic and meaning: ‘Function and Concept’, ‘On Concept and Object’, ‘On Sense and Reference’ and ‘Thoughts’.

I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Birmingham, particularly Joss Walker, for the patience with which they have read and commented on successive redraftings of this material.

H. W. N.

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

Blackwell Publishers for Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. P. Geach and M. Black, Oxford, 1969; Posthumous Writings, trans. P. Long and H. White, Oxford, 1979; and Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy, ed. B. McGuinness, trans. M. Black et al., Oxford, 1984.

Blackwell Publishers and Northwestern University Press for Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin, Oxford and Evanston, Ill., 1968.

Oxford University Press for Gottlob Frege, Conceptual Notation and Related Articles, ed. and trans. T. W. Bynum, Oxford, 1972.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

1

Introduction: Frege’s Life and Work

Biography

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was the founder of modern mathematical logic, which he created in his first book, Conceptual Notation, a Formula Language of Pure Thought Modelled upon the Formula Language of Arithmetic (Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formalsprache des reinen Denkens (1879), translated in Frege 1972). This describes a system of symbolic logic which goes far beyond the two thousand year old Aristotelian logic on which, hitherto, there had been little decisive advance. Frege was also one of the main formative influences, together with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore, on the analytical school of philosophy which now dominates the English-speaking philosophical world. Apart from his definitive contribution to logic, his writings on the philosophy of mathematics, philosophical logic and the theory of meaning are such that no philosopher working in any of these areas today could hope to make a contribution without a thorough familiarity with Frege’s philosophy. Yet in his lifetíme the significance of Frege’s work was little acknowledged. Even his work on logic met with general incomprehension and his work in philosophy was mostly unread and unappreciated. He was, however, studied by Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap and via these great figures he has eventually achieved general recognition.

Frege’s life was not a personally fulfilled one (for more detailed accounts of the following see Bynum’s introduction to Frege 1972 and Beaney’s introduction to Frege 1997). His wife died twenty years before his own death in 1925 (he was survived by an adopted son, Alfred) and, ironically, his life’s work in the philosophy of mathematics, to which he regarded all the rest of his efforts as subordinate, that is, his attempted demonstration that arithmetic was a branch of logic (the ‘logicist thesis’ as it is now called), was dealt a fatal blow by Bertrand Russell, one of his greatest admirers, who showed that it entailed the inconsistency that now bears his name (‘Russell’s Paradox’). Nevertheless, Frege perhaps gained some comfort from the respect accorded to him by Russell and by Wittgenstein, who met Frege several times and revered him above all other philosophers. In retrospect, indeed, many would perhaps say that in philosophy generally, as distinct from the narrower branches of logic and the philosophy of mathematics, Frege’s greatest contribution was the advance in the philosophy of logic and language which made Wittgenstein’s work possible.

Little is known of Frege’s personality and life outside philosophy. Apparently his politics and social views, as recorded in his diaries, reveal him to have been, in his later years, extremely right-wing, strongly opposed to democracy and to civil rights for Catholics and Jews. Frege’s greatest commentator, Michael Dummett, expresses great shock and disappointment (1973: xii) that someone he had revered as an absolutely rational man could have been imbued with such prejudices. But a more generous view is the one expressed by another great Frege scholar, Peter Geach. Geach writes that while Frege was indeed imbued with typical German conservative prejudices, ‘to borrow an epigram from Quine, it doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you’re not sincere. Nobody can really imagine Frege as an active politico devoted to some course like Hitler’s’ (1976c: 437).

We have, however, a presentation of the more attractive side of Frege in an account Wittgenstein gives of his encounters with him: