Unexpected Sources for the History of Analytic Philosophy
Gottlob Frege is often called the father of analytic philosophy, and much contemporary analytic Frege scholarship treats him as a clean break from the past, as initiating a new tradition ex nihilo. To be sure, Frege was very original, but he didn't create everything anew. The impression of radical novelty arises largely from neglect (within the English-speaking Analytic tradition) of nineteenth-century German thought in general, of Jena in the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, and of the details of Frege's teachers, intellectual circle, and mathematical training and research in, um, even more particular. Frege was shaped by the distinctive intellectual environment he found himself in, in both profound ways pertaining to the details of his philosophy and logic, and in superficial ways concerning his choices of modes of expression. (The latter incorporated a now-forgotten "code" he used to speak to mathematicians and philosophers of his time and place.) In this seminar, I'll chart out the details needed to read Frege's early writings on logic, language, and the foundations of mathematics (especially Foundations of Arithmetic) as shaped by Frege's location at the intersection of several different streams of research.