In Frege's Conception of Logic Patricia A. Blanchette explores the relationship between Gottlob Frege's understanding of conceptual analysis and his understanding of logic. She argues that the fruitfulness of Frege's conception of logic, and the illuminating differences between that conception and those more modern views that have largely supplanted it, are best understood against the backdrop of a clear account of the role of conceptual analysis in logical investigation. The first part of the book locates the role of conceptual analysis in Frege's logicist project. Blanchette argues that despite a number of difficulties, Frege's use of analysis in the service of logicism is a powerful and coherent tool. As a result of coming to grips with his use of that tool, we can see that there is, despite appearances, no conflict between Frege's intention to demonstrate the grounds of ordinary arithmetic and the fact that the numerals of his derived sentences fail to co-refer with ordinary numerals. In the second part of the book, Blanchette explores the resulting conception of logic itself, and some of the straightforward ways in which Frege's conception differs from its now-familiar descendants. In particular, Blanchette argues that consistency, as Frege understands it, differs significantly from the kind of consistency demonstrable via the construction of models. To appreciate this difference is to appreciate the extent to which Frege was right in his debate with Hilbert over consistency- and independence-proofs in geometry. For similar reasons, modern results such as the completeness of formal systems and the categoricity of theories do not have for Frege the same importance they are commonly taken to have by his post-Tarskian descendants. These differences, together with the coherence of Frege's position, provide reason for caution with respect to the appeal to formal systems and their properties in the treatment of fundamental logical properties and relations.

For many philosophers, modern philosophy begins in 1879 with the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift, in which Frege presents the first truly modern logic in his symbolic language, Begriffsschrift, or concept-script. Macbeth's book, the first full-length study of this language, offers a highly original new reading of Frege's logic based directly on Frege's own two-dimensional notation and his various writings about logic.

This analysis of Frege's views on language and metaphysics in On Sense and Reference, arguably one of the most important philosophical essays of the past hundred years, provides a thorough introduction to the function/argument analysis and applies Frege's technique to the central notions of predication, identity, existence and truth. Of particular interest is the analysis of the Paradox of Identity and a discussion of three solutions: the little-known Begriffsschrift solution, the sense/reference solution, and Russell's 'On Denoting' solution. Russell's views wend their way through the work, serving as a foil to Frege. Appendices give the proofs of the first 68 propositions of Begriffsschrift in modern notation. This book will be of interest to students and professionals in philosophy and linguistics.

Pieranna Garavaso and Nicla Vassallo investigate Gottlob Frege's notion of thinking (das Denken) to provide a new analysis of a largely unexplored area of the philosopher's work. Confronting Frege's deeply seated and widely emphasized anti-psychologism, Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance claims that the objective human science that Frege proposed can only be possible through a nuanced notion of thinking as neither merely psychological nor merely logical. Focusing on what Frege says about thinking in many passages from his works, Garavaso and Vassallo argue that Frege was engaged with issues that are still alive in contemporary debates, such as the definition of knowledge and the necessary role of language in conceptual thinking and in the expression of thoughts. Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance is essential not only for those interested in a new and original reading of Frege’s philosophy, but also for anyone engaged in epistemology, logic, psychology, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Gottlob Frege's attempt to found mathematics on a grand logical system came to grief when Bertrand Russell discovered a contradiction in it. This book surveys consistent restrictions in both the old and new versions of Frege's system, determining just how much of mathematics can be reconstructed in each.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.