The Cambridge Companion to Frege

by Edited by Tom Ricketts , Michael Potter

• ISBN13: 9780521624282
• ISBN10: 0521624282
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was unquestionably one of the most important philosophers of all time. He trained as a mathematician, and his work in philosophy started as an attempt to provide an explanation of the truths of arithmetic, but in the course of this attempt he not only founded modern logic but also had to address fundamental questions in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Frege is generally seen (along with Russell and Wittgenstein) as one of the fathers of the analytic method, which dominated philosophy in English-speaking countries for most of the twentieth century. His work is studied today not just for its historical importance but also because many of his ideas are still seen as relevant to current debates in the philosophies of logic, language, mathematics and the mind. The Cambridge Companion to Frege provides a route into this lively area of research.

Author Biography

Michael Potter is Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. He is the author of Wittgenstein's Notes on Logic (2009), Set Theory and its Philosophy (2004) and Reason's Nearest Kin (2000). Tom Ricketts is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of numerous articles on the development of analytic philosophy, especially Frege, Wittgenstein and Carnap.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Note on translations	p. xv
Chronology	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
Understanding Frege's project	p. 32
Frege's conception of logic	p. 63
Dummett's Frege	p. 86
What is a predicate?	p. 118
Concepts, objects and the Context Principle	p. 149
Sense and reference: the origins and development of the distinction	p. 220
On sense and reference: a critical reception	p. 293
Frege and semantics	p. 342
Frege's mathematical setting	p. 379
Frege and Hilbert	p. 413
Frege's folly: bearerless names and Basic Law V	p. 465
Frege and Russell	p. 509
Inheriting from Frege: the work of reception, as Wittgenstein did it	p. 550
Bibliography	p. 602
Index	p. 628
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