Mathematics
1848 to 1925, Wismar, Germany
The birth of modern logic: the quantifier, the definition of number, and the distinction between sense and reference that founded analytic philosophy.
Start learning Gottlob →In a thin 1879 book Frege built the first genuine formal system of logic - with quantifiers, bound variables, and a rigorous treatment of generality - replacing Aristotle’s syllogism and giving us the predicate lo…
In Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) Frege asked a question no one had answered rigorously - what is a number? - and argued that a statement of number is an assertion about a concept , that numbers are objective logi…
In ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ (1892) Frege solved a puzzle about identity - how ‘the morning star is the evening star’ can be informative though both name Venus - by distinguishing the reference o…
Frege insisted that logic and arithmetic are objective, not descriptions of how anyone happens to think - and he armed this with the context principle (ask for a word’s meaning only within a sentence) and a Platon…
As the second volume of the Grundgesetze went to press in 1902, a letter from Bertrand Russell revealed that Frege’s Basic Law V was inconsistent - a contradiction lay at the very foundation of his life’s wo…
More in Mathematics
EuclidPythagorasAl-KhwarizmiAlan TuringGottfried LeibnizAryabhataHypatia of AlexandriaBrahmaguptaepoché — a humanities education that remembers you.