Lessons from Frege A Personal Journey

For most of the 20th century, analytic philosophy has cultivated a very lopsided picture of the godfather of many of its constitutive notions. The generally accepted idea was that the particular view of logic Frege held to set up a philosophically sound foundation for arithmetic ended up being a mere historical curiosity when he was confronted with what is now known as Russell’s Paradox. It was only during the last quarter of the past century that a growing number of philosophers became aware that studying Frege in his own terms would be worth their while. Reevaluating Frege gave additional impetus to some ongoing philosophical projects and inspired some new ones. One of these projects is Brandom’s philosophy of rational pragmatism, which includes a discussion of Frege from the perspective Brandom wishes to develop. While I agree with many of his observations, I think we should also avoid reading more philosophy into Frege than he himself had intended: his original motive was mathematical, and philosophical only as required by his objectives. In that sense, we would be well advised to follow Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as being a radically different enterprise from science, a point alien to the mathematician Frege and not well received by Brandom and his followers.