Gottlob Frege
1848–1925 · Philosophy of Language · Prominent
Frege was a German mathematician who built the first working system of modern logic, a way of writing arguments so their form can be checked like a calculation, and tried to found all of arithmetic on it. The morning star and the evening star are one planet, so why does being told they are the same tell you anything? His answer, that a name carries a sense on top of the thing it points at, remade the study of language.
Signature
The position Frege is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Universals
- strongly leans Realism
- Language
- Representation
Positions on the 2 axes the sources answer
- Universals
- strongly leans Realism (0 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Multiplicity (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
18 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Frege refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Knowledge
- Pure Reason / Receptive Intellect
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Language
- Representation
What is the fundamental nature of language?