Gottlob Frege

Gottlob Frege (born November 8, 1848, Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin—died July 26, 1925, Bad Kleinen, Germany) was a German mathematician and logician, who founded modern mathematical logic. Working on the borderline between philosophy and mathematics—viz., in the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical logic (in which no intellectual precedents existed)—Frege discovered, on his own, the fundamental ideas that have made possible the whole modern development of logic and thereby invented an entire discipline.

Frege was the son of Alexander Frege, a principal of a girls’ high school in Wismar. His mother, Auguste Frege, née Bialloblotzky, who was perhaps of Polish origin, outlived her husband, who died in 1866. Frege entered the University of Jena in 1869, where he studied for two years, and then went to the University of Göttingen for a further two—in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and philosophy. Frege spent the whole of his working life as a teacher of mathematics at Jena: he became a Privatdozent in May 1871, was made an ausserordentlicher Professor (associate professor) in July 1879, and became statutory professor of mathematics in May 1896. He lectured in all branches of mathematics (though his mathematical publications outside the field of logic are extremely few) and also on his own logical system. A great many of his publications, however, were expressly philosophical in character: he himself once said, “Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher at least half a mathematician.” He kept aloof from his students and even more aloof from his colleagues.

Though Frege was married, his wife died during World War I, leaving him no children of his own. There was an adopted son, Alfred, however, who became an engineer.

Frege was, in religion, a liberal Lutheran and, in politics, a reactionary. He had a great love for the monarchy and for the royal house of Mecklenburg, and during World War I he developed an intense hatred of socialism and of democracy, to which he came to ascribe the loss of the war and the shame of the Treaty of Versailles. A diary kept at the end of his life reveals, as well, a loathing of the French and of Catholics and an anti-Semitism extending to a belief that the Jews must be expelled from Germany.

Frege had a vivid awareness of his own genius and a belief that it would one day be recognized; but he became increasingly embittered at the failure of scholars to recognize it during his lifetime. He delighted in controversy and polemic; but the originality of his own work, the almost total independence of his own ideas from other influences, past or present, was quite exceptional and, indeed, astonishing.

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Philosophy 101

System of mathematical logic.

In 1879 Frege published his Begriffsschrift (“Conceptscript”), in which, for the first time, a system of mathematical logic in the modern sense was presented. No one at the time, however—philosopher or mathematician—comprehended clearly what Frege had done, and when, some decades later, the subject began to get under way, his ideas reached others mostly as filtered through the minds of other men, such as Peano; in his lifetime there were very few—one was Bertrand Russell—to give Frege the credit due to him. He was not yet too downcast by the failure of the learned world to appreciate the Begriffsschrift, which, after all, discourages the reader by the use of a complex and unfamiliar symbolism to express unfamiliar ideas. He resolved, however, to compose his next book without the use of any symbols at all.

There followed a period of intensive work on the philosophy of logic and of mathematics, embodied initially in his first book, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884; The Foundations of Arithmetic). The Grundlagen was a work that must on any count stand as a masterpiece of philosophical writing. The only review that the book received, however, was a devastatingly hostile one by Georg Cantor, the mathematician whose ideas were the closest to Frege’s, who had not bothered to understand Frege’s book before subjecting it to totally unmerited scorn.

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Wounded by the reception of his second book, Frege nevertheless devoted the next decade to producing a series of brilliant philosophical articles in which he elaborated his philosophy of logic. These articles contain many deep insights, although, as Frege systematized his theories, there appeared a certain hardening into a kind of scholasticism. There followed a return to the philosophy of mathematics with the first volume of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1893; partial Eng. trans., Basic Laws of Arithmetic), in which Frege presented, in a modified version of the symbolic system of the Begriffsschrift, a rigorous development of the theory of Grundlagen. This, too, received only a single review (by Peano). The neglect of what was to have been his chef d’oeuvre finally embittered Frege, who had complained, in the preface, of the apparent ignorance of his work on the part of writers working in allied fields. The resulting bitterness shows in the style of Frege’s controversial writing. Seldom has criticism of previous writers been more deadly than in his Grundlagen; but it is expressed with a lightness of touch and is never unfair. In volume 2 of the Grundgesetze (1903), however, the attacks became heavyhanded and abusive—a means of getting back at the world that had ignored him.