Gottlob Frege is recognised as the originator of quantified predicate logic, and of many of the concepts which have become central in the philosophy of language. His academic training was in mathematics, and he spent most of his career at the University of Jena, apart from two years at the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate (Beaney 1997, 374). In his personal opinions he was extremely conservative, anti-democratic and anti-semitic (Dummett, 1973, xii). However, this is not apparent in his published writings, which all stem from his interest in the foundations of arithmetic. The project of showing how arithmetic could be reduced to logic forced him to attempt to develop a formal, symbolic language in which each inferential step was perfectly perspicuous. Unlike many…
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Citation: Green, Karen Anne Hamnet. "Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 October 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13025, accessed 24 November 2024.]
