Gottlob Frege

From Philosopedia

Frege, Gottlob (1848—1925)

Frege, one of the founders of symbolic logic, wrote a two-volume work, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893 - 1903), demonstrating that mathematics is derived solely from deductive logic, that it is not synthetic as Kant had posited.

Rudolf Carnap was one of his students when he taught at Jena.

However, Bertrand Russell and others pointed out some serious contradictions in his work, and Frege wrote few other original works.

Michael Dummett, in Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993), holds that Frege was the most important contributor to the science of logic since Aristotle, adding that German-speaking philosophers have contributed more to analytical philosophy than have English- or French-speaking writers.

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