Gottlob Frege 1848 – 1925

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a 19th and early 20th-century German mathematician, logician, and philosopher, regarded as the founder of modern formal logic and one of the founders of analytic philosophy. His 1879 work Begriffsschrift introduced the system of formal predicate logic that has been the foundation of subsequent logic in mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics. The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and Basic Laws of Arithmetic developed his logicist project of deriving arithmetic from pure logic. His distinction between sense and reference, set out in a famous 1892 essay, has been foundational to subsequent philosophy of language. His work was decisive in shaping Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and the entire analytic tradition.

Gottlob Frege was born in 1848 in Wismar on the Baltic coast. He studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, and philosophy at Jena and at Gottingen, where he took his doctorate in 1873 with a dissertation on the foundations of geometry. He spent his entire career at Jena, habilitating in 1874 and remaining there as lecturer and then extraordinary professor of mathematics until his retirement in 1918.

His major works are the Begriffsschrift (1879), which introduced modern quantificational logic; The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), with its philosophical case for logicism; the essays 'Function and Concept', 'On Sense and Reference', and 'On Concept and Object' of the early 1890s; and the two volumes of the Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893, 1903). As the second volume was going to press, Bertrand Russell wrote to him about the paradox now known as Russell's, which threatened the system's consistency.

Although Frege was little read in his lifetime, the philosophical tradition that flowed through Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and the analytic mainstream rests squarely on his foundations: modern logic, the distinction between sense and reference, the context principle, and the linguistic turn all begin with him. He died in Bad Kleinen in 1925.