I just realized how unconsciously we alliterate. It amuses. At least at this point in time where I am sitting in the reading room (with high ceilings, large tables and large chairs) attempting to read Frege.
Recent Alliterations used are not really all that poetic... actually they are really crust...like...big boobies? big breasts? oki opai(which means the same thing as the latter), fuck Frege (which precipitated this entry, lesbian lover(which doesn't refer to me), freaking funny... now i wonder... mabbe lynn might be able to help... is fugly an acronym? a compound word? I don't think so. what? i wonder do you call a combination word?
I hate Frege. I hate Frege. I hate Frege.
This is who Frege is:
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (November 8, 1848 – July 26, 1925) was a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is regarded as a founder of both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy.
Frege's life
Frege was born in Wismar. He started studying at the University of Jena in 1869 and moved to Göttingen after two years, where he received his Ph.D. in 1873. After returning to Jena two years later, he became lecturer of mathematics. In 1879, he was made associate professor and in 1896 became professor of mathematics. He died in Bad Kleinen in 1925.
Frege's contributions
Frege is widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. His revolutionary Begriffsschrift, or Concept Script from 1879 marked the beginning of a new epoch in the history of logic by displacing the old Term Logic that had held sway virtually unchanged since Aristotle. The Begriffsschrift was ground-breaking, and made contributions that are nowadays ubiquitous in mathematics, such as the use of quantification, which solved the medieval problem of multiple generality, and a clean treatment of functions and variables.
Frege was the first to devise an axiomatization of propositional logic and of predicate logic, the latter of which was his own invention. The quantification so essential to Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, and to Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, was also due to Frege. His work was largely unrecognized in his own day, and his ideas spread chiefly through those he influenced, particularly Giuseppe Peano and Russell. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Edmund Husserl were among the other philosophical notables strongly influenced by Frege.
Frege is regarded as one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, due to his deeply systematic contributions to the philosophy of language, most fundamentally his function-argument analysis of the proposition, his distinction between the sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung) of a proper name (Eigenname), the advocacy of a mediated reference theory, his distinction between concept and object (Begriff und Gegenstand), and his advancement of the context principle. He corresponded with many leading logicians and philosophers of his time such as Russell, Peano and Husserl.
Frege was a major proponent of logicism about arithmetic (the view that arithmetic is reducible to logic). His Grundgesetze der Arithmetik was an attempt to explicitly derive the laws of arithmetic from logic. After the first volume was published (at the author's expense), Russell discovered the paradox which bears his name, and that the axioms of the Grundgesetze led to this contradiction; he wrote to Frege, who acknowledged the contradiction in an appendix to volume two of the Grundgesetze, noting what he perceived to be the faulty axiom. Frege never did manage to amend his axioms to his satisfaction, although later work by Russell and by John Von Neumann suggested ways to resolve the problem.
He was also a philosopher of mathematics, who loathed appealing to psychologistic or "mental" explanations for meanings (such as idea theories of meaning). His original purpose was very far from answering questions about meaning -- he wanted to use modern logic to further develop the foundations of arithmetic. He first undertook to answer the question, "what is a number?" or "what objects do number-words ("one", "two", etc.) refer to?". But in pursuing these matters, he was eventually confronted with the task of analysing and explaining what meaning is, and came to several memorable conclusions in that regard.
Despite this, and despite the generosity of Bertrand Russell's praise for Frege, he remained an obscure figure through his lifetime; had it not been for his influence on Wittgenstein-- of whom both major works, the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, revolved around a coming to terms with Frege's ideas about logic and language-- Frege's worth as a philosopher might never have been recognised.
According to Frege, sense and reference are two aspects of the meaning of a linguistic expression. The reference of an expression is simply the object that the expression refers to. The sense of an expression, more controversially, is what provides the cognitive significance of the expression.
I wish he had remained... OBSCURE.
