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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.”
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“Never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.”
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“The laws of truth are not psychological laws.”
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“A statement of number contains an assertion about a concept.”
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“Thoughts are objective; they are neither things in the external world nor ideas in the mind.”