Gottlob Frege Quotes on Mind
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Gottlob Frege on the topic of mind, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“Thoughts are objective; they are neither things in the external world nor ideas in the mind.”
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“If the task of philosophy is to break the domination of words over the human mind [...], then my concept notation, being developed for these purposes, can be a useful instrument for philosophers [...] I believe the cause of logic has been advanced already by the invention of this concept notation.”
Begriffsschrift (1879) Preface to the Begriffsschrift -
“This ideography is a "formula language", that is, a lingua characterica , a language written with special symbols, "for pure thought", that is, free from rhetorical embellishments, "modeled upon that of arithmetic", that is, constructed from specific symbols that are manipulated according to definite rules.”
paraphrasing Frege's Begriffsschrift, a formula language, modeled upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought (1879) in Jean Van Heijenoort ed., in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (1967) -
“paraphrasing Frege's Begriffsschrift, a formula language, modeled upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought (1879) in Jean Van Heijenoort ed., in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (1967)”
This ideography is a "formula language", that is, a lingua characterica , a language written with special symbols, "for pure thought", that is, free from rhetorical embellishments, "modeled upon that of arithmetic", that is, constructed from specific symbols that are manipulated according to definite rules.