Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege

Karen Anne Hamnet Green (University of Melbourne)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.1: German-language Writing and Culture: Germany, 500-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Domains

Logic
Logic and Number theory

Dates

Born 8 Nov 1848
Died 26 Jul 1925
Activity 1875-1925

Places

Born in Germany
Active in Germany

Resources

Gottlob Frege is recognised as the originator of quantified predicate logic, and of many of the concepts which have become central in the philosophy of language. His academic training was in mathematics, and he spent most of his career at the University of Jena, apart from two years at the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate (Beaney 1997, 374). In his personal opinions he was extremely conservative, anti-democratic and anti-semitic (Dummett, 1973, xii). However, this is not apparent in his published writings, which all stem from his interest in the foundations of arithmetic. The project of showing how arithmetic could be reduced to logic forced him to attempt to develop a formal, symbolic language in which each …

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2354 words

Citation: Green, Karen Anne Hamnet. "Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 October 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13025, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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