Two Concepts of Concept in Early Analytic Philosophy

Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) and Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) stand at the beginning of the development of analytic philosophy. Both philosophers offer accounts of concepts that take them to be abstract objects, and for both of them concepts play an important theoretical role. However, while Bolzano worked out the Kantian view of concepts, Frege himself approached concepts from a new angle. In this chapter I first introduce the Bolzanian view of concepts and then discuss how Frege provided a fresh start in the theory of concepts by introducing the notion of incompleteness.