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As others have said, I do think Frege gets a fair shake in academia, but he definitely could be studied more. He certainly doesn’t have the near pop-philosophic
by voidhorse 4y ago
As others have said, I do think Frege gets a fair shake in academia, but he definitely could be studied more. He certainly doesn’t have the near pop-philosophical status of a Russel. I would also agree that Russel is overrated. For some reason, the public seems to love experts of narrow technical or scientific fields that proffer, usually inadequate, takes of other areas like morals all whilst ignoring the experts in fields like morality (I can think of some other situations in which the political opinions of e.g. cosmologists are venerated on the basis of their expertise in cosmology, which of course makes absolutely no sense but seems to be something people love to do. Apparently deeply specialized expertise means you’re “smart” and therefore anything you say even on subjects you don’t know a lick about must also be “smart”)
Aside from Wittgenstein, Frege is the “analytic” philosopher I most admire. There’s a certain creative genius that shines through his work that I feel is absent from the work of many other analytic philosophers. His short Foundations of Mathematics text quite literally changed my life by making math interesting to me for the first time. I was lucky enough to read a copy of the Begriffs chrift since my school’s library had it, it’s a work of beauty!
- rrwo 4y agoThere's too much focus on Frege (as well as Russell and Wittgenstein) in analytic philosophy. You would think people such as Boole, Peirce, Łukaiewicz, Tarski, Brouwer, Heyting, Gentzen, Prawitz, Girard, and Martin-Löf are mere footnotes in the history of logic. Yet their work is more relevant and used by working mathematicians and computer scientists.
- ogogmad 4y agoThis is a brilliant comment. Thank you. Each in turn: Boole invented propositional logic. Peirce supposedly invented a lot, but got overlooked. Łukaiewicz, I'm not sure. Tarski employed quantifier elimination to prove the decidability of various theories like Euclidean geometry. Brouwer invented intuitionistic logic, and a(n arguably) viable approach to doing analysis and topology intuitionistically. Heyting provided semantics to intuitionistic logic. Gentzen created the proof calculus Natural Deduction which resembles informal proofs (as well as the closely related proof calculus Sequent Calculus). Prawitz I don't know. Girard, I don't know. Martin-Löf derived Dependently Typed Lambda Calculus using the Curry-Howard correspondence. I guess all this stuff gets overlooked because Russell's goal was very ambitious: He wanted to connect formal logic with everyday language, and how to perform sound everyday reasoning. In that sense, his ambition was similar to the Stoics. The above stuff mostly doesn't address this use-case.