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Name | Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege |
---|---|
Birth date | 8 November 1848 |
Birth place | Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany |
Death date | July 26, 1925 |
Death place | Bad Kleinen, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany |
School tradition | Analytic philosophy | |
Influences | Adolf Trendelenburg, Rudolf Hermann Lotze |
Influenced | Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Dummett, Edmund Husserl, Gershom Scholem, Ian Rumfitt, and most of the analytic tradition |Analytic Philosophy, Ordinary Language Philosophy | |
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German mathematician who became a logician and philosopher. He was one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. As a philosopher, he is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on the philosophy of language and mathematics. Although he was mainly ignored by the intellectual world when he published his writings, it was Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) and later Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) who helped introduce his work to later generations of logicians and philosophers.
In childhood, Frege encountered philosophies that would guide his future scientific career. For example, his father wrote a textbook on the German language for children aged 9–13, titled Hülfsbuch zum Unterrichte in der deutschen Sprache für Kinder von 9 bis 13 Jahren (2nd ed., Wismar, 1850; 3rd ed., Wismar and Ludwigslust: Hinstorff, 1862), the first section of which dealt with the structure and logic of language.
Frege studied at a gymnasium in Wismar, and graduated in 1869. His teacher [Gustav Adolf] Leo Sachse (5 November 1843 - 1 September 1909) (also a poet) played the most important role in determining Frege’s future scientific career, encouraging him to continue his studies at the University of Jena.
His other notable university teachers were [Christian Philipp] Karl Snell (1806–1886) (subjects: use of infinitesimal analysis in geometry, analytical geometry of planes, analytical mechanics, optics, physical foundations of mechanics); Hermann [Karl Julius Traugott] Schaeffer (1824–1900) (analytical geometry, applied physics, algebraic analysis, on the telegraph and other electronic machines); and the famous philosopher Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) (history of Kantian and critical philosophy).
Starting in 1871, Frege continued his studies in Göttingen, the leading university in mathematics in German-speaking territories, where he attended the lectures of [Rudolf Friedrich] Alfred Clebsch (1833–1872) (analytical geometry), Ernst Christian Julius Schering (1824–1897) (function theory), Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804–1891) (physical studies, applied physics), Eduard Riecke (1845–1915) (theory of electricity), and Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) (philosophy of religion). (Many of the philosophical doctrines of the mature Frege have parallels in Lotze; it has been the subject of scholarly debate whether or not there was a direct influence on Frege's views arising from his attending Lotze's lectures.)
In 1873, Frege attained his doctorate under Ernst Schering, with a dissertation under the title of "Über eine geometrische Darstellung der imaginären Gebilde in der Ebene" ("On a Geometrical Representation of Imaginary Forms in a Plane"), in which he aimed to solve such fundamental problems in geometry as the mathematical interpretation of projective geometry's infinitely distant (imaginary) points.
Frege married Margarete Katharina Sophia Anna Lieseberg (15 February 1856 - 25 June 1904) on March 14, 1887.
It is frequently noted that Aristotle's logic is unable to represent even the most elementary inferences in Euclid's geometry, but Frege's "conceptual notation" can represent inferences involving indefinitely complex mathematical statements. The analysis of logical concepts and the machinery of formalization that is essential to Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910–1913) (by Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970, and Alfred North Whitehead, 1861–1947), to Russell's theory of descriptions, to Kurt Gödel's (1906–1978) incompleteness theorems, and to Alfred Tarski's (1901–1983) theory of truth, is ultimately due to Frege.
One of Frege's stated purposes was to isolate genuinely logical principles of inference, so that in the proper representation of mathematical proof, one would at no point appeal to "intuition". If there was an intuitive element, it was to be isolated and represented separately as an axiom: from there on, the proof was to be purely logical and without gaps. Having exhibited this possibility, Frege's larger purpose was to defend the view that arithmetic is a branch of logic, a view known as logicism: unlike geometry, arithmetic was to be shown to have no basis in "intuition", and no need for non-logical axioms. Already in the 1879 Begriffsschrift important preliminary theorems, for example a generalized form of mathematical induction, were derived within what Frege understood to be pure logic.
This idea was formulated in non-symbolic terms in his Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) (The Foundations of Arithmetic). Later, in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic) (vol. 1, 1893; vol. 2, 1903) (vol. 2 of which was published at his own expense), Frege attempted to derive, by use of his symbolism, all of the laws of arithmetic from axioms he asserted as logical. Most of these axioms were carried over from his Begriffsschrift, though not without some significant changes. The one truly new principle was one he called the Basic Law V: the "value-range" of the function f(x) is the same as the "value-range" of the function g(x) if and only if ∀x[f(x) = g(x)].
The crucial case of the law may be formulated in modern notation as follows. Let {x|Fx} denote the extension of the predicate Fx, i.e., the set of all Fs, and similarly for Gx. Then Basic Law V says that the predicates Fx and Gx have the same extension iff ∀x[Fx ↔ Gx]. The set of Fs is the same as the set of Gs just in case every F is a G and every G is an F. (The case is special because what is here being called the extension of a predicate, or a set, is only one type of "value-range" of a function.)
In a famous episode, Bertrand Russell wrote to Frege, just as Vol. 2 of the Grundgesetze was about to go to press in 1903, showing that Russell's paradox could be derived from Frege's Basic Law V. It is easy to define the relation of membership of a set or extension in Frege's system; Russell then drew attention to "the set of things x that are such that x is not a member of x". The system of the Grundgesetze entails that the set thus characterised both is and is not a member of itself, and is thus inconsistent. Frege wrote a hasty, last-minute Appendix to Vol. 2, deriving the contradiction and proposing to eliminate it by modifying Basic Law V. Frege opened the Appendix with the exceptionally honest comment: "Hardly anything more unfortunate can befall a scientific writer than to have one of the foundations of his edifice shaken after the work is finished. This was the position I was placed in by a letter of Mr. Bertrand Russell, just when the printing of this volume was nearing its completion." (This letter and Frege's reply are translated in Jean van Heijenoort 1967.)
Frege's proposed remedy was subsequently shown to imply that there is but one object in the universe of discourse, and hence is worthless (indeed, this would make for a contradiction in Frege's system if he had axiomatized the idea, fundamental to his discussion, that the True and the False are distinct objects; see, for example, Dummett 1973), but recent work has shown that much of the program of the Grundgesetze might be salvaged in other ways:
Frege's work in logic had little international attention until 1903 when Russell wrote an appendix to The Principles of Mathematics stating his differences with Frege. The diagrammatic notation that Frege used had no antecedents (and has had no imitators since). Moreover, until Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (3 vols.) appeared in 1910–13, the dominant approach to mathematical logic was still that of George Boole (1815–1864) and his intellectual descendants, especially Ernst Schröder (1841–1902). Frege's logical ideas nevertheless spread through the writings of his student Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and other admirers, particularly Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).
As a philosopher of mathematics, Frege attacked the psychologistic appeal to mental explanations of the content of judgment of the meaning of sentences. His original purpose was very far from answering general questions about meaning; instead, he devised his logic to explore the foundations of arithmetic, undertaking to answer questions such as "What is a number?" or "What objects do number-words ("one", "two", etc.) refer to?" But in pursuing these matters, he eventually found himself analysing and explaining what meaning is, and thus came to several conclusions that proved highly consequential for the subsequent course of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language.
It should be kept in mind that Frege was employed as a mathematician, not a philosopher, and he published his philosophical papers in scholarly journals that often were hard to access outside of the German-speaking world. He never published a philosophical monograph other than The Foundations of Arithmetic, much of which was mathematical in content, and the first collections of his writings appeared only after World War II. A volume of English translations of Frege's philosophical essays first appeared in 1952, edited by students of Wittgenstein, Peter Geach (born 1916) and Max Black (1909–1988), with the bibliographic assistance of Wittgenstein (see Geach, ed. 1975, Introduction). Hence, despite the generous praise of Russell and Wittgenstein, Frege was little known as a philosopher during his lifetime. His ideas spread chiefly through those he influenced, such as Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap, and through Polish work on logic and semantics.
The distinction can be illustrated thus: In their ordinary uses, the name "Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor", which for logical purposes is an unanalyzable whole, and the functional expression "the Prince of Wales", which contains the significant parts "the prince of ξ" and "Wales", have the same reference, namely, the person best known as Prince Charles. But the sense of the word "Wales" is a part of the sense of the latter expression, but no part of the sense of the "full name" of Prince Charles.
These distinctions were disputed by Bertrand Russell, especially in his paper "On Denoting"; the controversy has continued into the present, fueled especially by Saul Kripke's famous lectures "Naming and Necessity".
Imagine the road signs outside a city. They all point to (bedeuten) the same object (the city), although the "mode of presentation" or sense (Sinn) of each sign (its direction or distance) is different. Similarly "the Prince of Wales" and "Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor" both denote (bedeuten) the same object, though each uses a different "mode of presentation" (sense or Sinn).
"Frege actually died a Nazi. Sluga reports: 'Frege confided in his diary in 1924 that he had once thought of himself as a liberal and was an admirer of Bismarck, but his heroes now were General Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler. This was after the two had tried to topple the elected democratic government in a coup in November 1923. In his diary Frege also used all his analytic skills to devise plans for expelling the Jews from Germany and for suppressing the Social Democrats.' Michael Dummett tells of his shock to discover, while reading Frege's diary, that his hero was an outspoken anti-Semite (1973)."
Even prior to his sympathies with Hitler and the Nazis, Frege held very conservative political views. He disliked the small steps towards democracy made in the German Empire (created 1871), not the least because it increased the power of the Socialists. His anti-Semitism fueled his desire to see all Jews expelled from Germany, or at least deprived certain political rights (notwithstanding the fact that among his students was Gershom Scholem, 1897–1982, who much valued his teacher). In addition to his anti-Semitic sentiments, his diaries also show a deep hatred of Catholics and of the French.
Frege was described by his students as a highly introverted person, seldom entering the dialogue, mostly facing the blackboard while lecturing though being witty and sometimes bitterly sarcastic.
Logical Investigations (1918–1923). Frege intended that the following three papers be published together in a book titled Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations). Though the German book never appeared, English translations did appear together in Logical Investigations, ed. Peter Geach, Blackwell's, 1975.
Logic and mathematics:
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