Introduction

Summary

It will be generally agreed that Frege's thought had a remarkable impact on the philosophy of the twentieth century, although how to evaluate his significance is controversial. Among his current interpreters there is strong disagreement about what kind of philosophy he was advocating, as can be seen from the variety of labels that have been attached to him, ranging from “analytic philosopher”, “rationalist” and “neokantian” to “platonist” or even “neopythagorean”. One of the major reasons for this disagreement, I think, is that most accounts of Frege's philosophy concentrate on only a few of the issues he raises in his philosophical papers. This approach results from the way he published his contributions to philosophy. Although he wrote books on logic and mathematics, his major contributions to philosophy are to be found in the many articles and reviews he published in various philosophical journals. At the end of his life he started to publish a sequence of articles that was to contain all his major philosophical ideas, but the project remained a torso. We know, however, from his Posthumous Writings that he worked at it from the beginning of the 1880s and that he wrote several drafts of this project called “Logic” before he started to publish the unfinished sequence entitled Logical Investigations.