No one has figured more prominently in the study of German philosopher Gottlob Frege than Michael Dummett. This highly acclaimed book is a major contribution to the philosophy of language as well as a systematic interpretation of Frege, indisputably the father of analytic philosophy. Frege: Philosophy of Language remains indispensable for an understanding of contemporary philosophy. Harvard University Press is pleased to reissue this classic book in paperback.

Analytic philosophy--arguably one of the most important philosophical movements in the twentieth century--has gained a new historical self-consciousness, particularly about its own origins. Between 1880 and 1930, the most important work of its founding figures (Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein) not only gained attention but flourished. In this collection, fifteen previously unpublished essays explore different facets of this period, with an emphasis on the vital intellectual relationship between Frege and the early Wittgenstein.

cake, even though it is typically given the pride of place in expositions in Frege's semantics. As a part of this attempted reversal of emphasis, Jaakko Hintikka has also called attention to the role Frege played in convincing almost everyone that verbs for being had to be treated as multiply ambiguous between the "is" of identity, the "is" of predication, the "is" of existence, and the "is" of class-inclusion - a view that had been embraced by few major figures (if any) before Frege, with the exception of John Stuart Mill and Augustus De Morgan. Hintikka has gone on to challenge this ambiguity thesis. At the same time, Frege's role in the genesis of another major twentieth-century philosophical movement, the phenomenological one, has become an important issue. Even the translation of Frege's key term "Bedeutung" as "reference" has become controversial. The interpretation of Frege is thus thrown largely back in the melting pot. In editing this volume, we have not tried to publish the last word on Frege. Even though we may harbor such ambitions ourselves, they are not what has led to the present editorial enterprise. What we have tried to do is to bring together some of the best ongoing work on Frege. Even though the ultimate judgment on our success lies with out readers, we want to register our satisfaction with all the contributions.

Most areas of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s thought have been explored, but his views on logic, mathematics, and semantics have been largely ignored. These essays offer an alternative to discussions of the philosophy of contemporary mathematics. The book covers areas of disagreement between Husserl and Gottlob Frege, the father of analytical philosophy, and explores new perspectives seen in their work.

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.

Not only can the influence of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) be found in contemporary work in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language, but his projects--and the very terminology he employed in pursuing those projects--are still current in contemporary philosophy. This is undoubtedly why it seems so reasonable to assume that we can read Frege' s writings as if he were one of us, speaking to our philosophical concerns in our language. In Joan Weiner's view, however, Frege's words can be accurately interpreted only if we set that assumption aside. Weiner here offers a challenging new approach to the philosophy of this central figure in analytic philosophy. Weiner finds in Frege's corpus, from Begriffsschrift (1879) on, a unified project of remarkable ambition to which each of the writings in that corpus makes a distinct contribution--a project whose motivation she brings to life through a careful reading of his Foundations of Arithmetic. The Frege that Weiner brings into clear view is very different from the familiar figure. Far from having originated one of the standard positions on the nature of reference, Frege turns out not to have had positive doctrines on anything like what contemporary philosophers mean by "reference." Far from having served as a standard-bearer for those who take the realists' side of contemporary disputes with anti-realists, Frege turns out to have had no stake in either side of the controversy. Through Weiner's lens, Frege emerges as a thinker who has principled reasons for challenging the very assumptions and motivations that animate philosophers to dispute these doctrines. This lucidly written and accessible book will generate controversy among all readers with an interest in epistemology, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics.

Frege’s 1879 Begriffsschrift presented the first truly modern logic in a symbolic language, Begriffsschrift, or concept-script. The first full-length study of this language, offers a new reading of Frege’s logic based directly on Frege's own two-dimensional notation and his various writings about logic.

This book provides a completely new and systematic account of Frege's philosophy by focusing on its cornerstone: the theory of sense and reference.

This collection brings together recent scholarship on Frege, including new translations of German material which is made available to Anglophone scholars for the first time.

What is the number one? How do we know that 2+2=4? These apparently simple questions are in fact notoriously difficult to answer, and in one form or other have occupied philosophers from ancient times to the present. Gottlob Frege's conviction that the truths of arithmetic, and mathematics more generally, are derived from self-evident logical truths formed the basis of a systematic project which revolutionized logic, and founded modern analytic philosophy. In this accessible and stimulating introduction, Joan Weiner traces the development of Frege's thought from his invention of a powerful new logical language in Begriffsschrift, through his explication of his project in the Foundations of Arithmetic and famous papers such as 'On Sense and Reference', to the brilliant, but ultimately doomed, presentation of the system in Basic Laws of Arithmetic. At each stage, she discusses Frege's motivations in a way which enables the modern reader to appreciate the originality, clarity, and profundity of his thought. Past Masters is a series of concise, lucid, authoritative introducitons to the thought of leading intellectual figures of the past whose ideas still influence the way we think today.