Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T20:49:28.188Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Frege and Russell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

Tom Ricketts
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Michael Potter
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Frege and Russell are often linked, as the founders of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Besides this historical, retrospective, connection, there are also important similarities in doctrine between them. Each was a logician, whose work in logic was closely integrated with his work in philosophy; each held that philosophical problems can be clarified and, in some cases, solved, by means of logic. (This view that the technical and the philosophical are not distinct is characteristic of one clear line of thought in twentieth-century analytic philosophy.) Each argued for, and tried to prove, logicism, the thesis that arithmetic can be reduced to logic, and is thus no more than logic in disguise. Each was strongly opposed to psychologism; each believed in a 'third realm', neither physical nor mental, which provides the subject matter for objective judgements about abstract matters. (In Frege's case, however, it is perhaps unclear just what this belief comes to.) In particular, each believed that our declarative sentences have an objective content, independent of human action - that, as Frege puts it, there is not my Pythagorean theorem and your Pythagorean theorem but the Pythagorean theorem, independent of both of us, and timelessly true. (Russell to some extent backs away from this view after 1906, as we shall see; the shift, however, has relatively little effect on the issues I shall be discussing in this essay.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×