25 Facts About Gottlob Frege

1.

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician.

2.

Gottlob Frege was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics.

3.

Gottlob Frege's contributions include the development of modern logic in the Begriffsschrift and work in the foundations of mathematics.

4.

In Foundations and "The Thought", Gottlob Frege argues for Platonism against psychologism or formalism, concerning numbers and propositions respectively.

5.

Gottlob Frege was born in 1848 in Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

6.

In childhood, Gottlob Frege encountered philosophies that would guide his future scientific career.

7.

Gottlob Frege's teacher Gustav Adolf Leo Sachse, who was a poet, played the most important role in determining Frege's future scientific career, encouraging him to continue his studies at the University of Jena.

8.

Gottlob Frege matriculated at the University of Jena in the spring of 1869 as a citizen of the North German Confederation.

9.

Abbe was more than a teacher to Gottlob Frege: he was a trusted friend, and, as director of the optical manufacturer Carl Zeiss AG, he was in a position to advance Gottlob Frege's career.

10.

Many of the philosophical doctrines of the mature Gottlob Frege have parallels in Lotze; it has been the subject of scholarly debate whether or not there was a direct influence on Gottlob Frege's views arising from his attending Lotze's lectures.

11.

In 1873, Gottlob Frege attained his doctorate under Ernst Christian Julius Schering, with a dissertation under the title of "Ueber eine geometrische Darstellung der imaginaren Gebilde in der Ebene", in which he aimed to solve such fundamental problems in geometry as the mathematical interpretation of projective geometry's infinitely distant points.

12.

Gottlob Frege married Margarete Katharina Sophia Anna Lieseberg on 14 March 1887.

13.

Gottlob Frege's goal was to show that mathematics grows out of logic, and in so doing, he devised techniques that separated him from the Aristotelian syllogistic but took him rather close to Stoic propositional logic.

14.

In effect, Gottlob Frege invented axiomatic predicate logic, in large part thanks to his invention of quantified variables, which eventually became ubiquitous in mathematics and logic, and which solved the problem of multiple generality.

15.

One of Gottlob Frege's stated purposes was to isolate genuinely logical principles of inference, so that in the proper representation of mathematical proof, one would at no point appeal to "intuition".

16.

Already in the 1879 Begriffsschrift important preliminary theorems, for example, a generalized form of law of trichotomy, were derived within what Gottlob Frege understood to be pure logic.

17.

Gottlob Frege's proposed remedy was shown to imply that there is but one object in the universe of discourse, and hence is worthless, but recent work has shown that much of the program of the Grundgesetze might be salvaged in other ways:.

18.

The diagrammatic notation that Gottlob Frege used had no antecedents.

19.

Gottlob Frege is one of the founders of analytic philosophy, whose work on logic and language gave rise to the linguistic turn in philosophy.

20.

Gottlob Frege held that propositions had a referential relationship with their truth-value.

21.

Gottlob Frege confided "that he had once thought of himself as a liberal and was an admirer of Bismarck", but then sympathized with General Ludendorff.

22.

Gottlob Frege had friendly relations with Jews in real life: among his students was Gershom Scholem, who greatly valued his teaching, and it was he who encouraged Ludwig Wittgenstein to leave for England in order to study with Bertrand Russell.

23.

Gottlob Frege was described by his students as a highly introverted person, seldom entering into dialogues with others and mostly facing the blackboard while lecturing.

24.

Gottlob Frege was known to occasionally show wit and even bitter sarcasm during his classes.

25.

Gottlob Frege intended that the following three papers be published together in a book titled Logische Untersuchungen.