Frege (Penguin Philosophy)

Although almost unknown in his lifetime, it was Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) who set the agenda for much of twentieth-century philosophy.His 'concept script' overthrew Aristotle's long-established system of logic and underlies all subsequent developments in the subject. His radically new approach to the foundations of arithmetic, based on fresh definitions of the terms 'zero', 'one' and 'successor', revolutionized our understanding of mathematics. And his important insights into the nature of language and meaning provided the framework for Russell, Wittgenstein and twentieth-century linguistic analysis. In this superb survey of his evolving ideas, Anthony Kenny explains and assesses the full range of Frege's work and reveals why it still forms an ideal introduction to modern analytic philosophy. Even after seventy years, he concludes, Frege remains an absolutely central figure, one of those rare thinkers who wrote 'prose which is accessible and attractive on first acquaintance and yet which repays rereading over a lifetime'.