Frege in Perspective (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 643 audiences--women and children--suggests that she herself might have assailed those who would have placed her within the canon. Finally, despite Sapiro's lament, Wollstonecraft is canonized as the creator of a, if not the, theory of feminism. The argument that people "misread" her or that they do not read enough of her works ironically attests to this. This claim has motivated many a reinterpretation of Marx, Locke, Nietzsche, and others in "the tradition" whose defenders claim have been canonized as something or another. Sapiro's rewriting of Wollstonecraft is thought-provoking, but even if she succeeds in convincing teachers to teach Wollstonecraft, they will still assign their introductory classes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as the text that represents her work, just as they assign The Social Contract, Reflections on the Revolution in France, The Second Treatise of Government, The Communist Manifesto, and Civilization and Its Discontents. And academics can always trivialize the thought of any political theorist into five pages on a preliminary examination. A political theory of language and representation might begin with the politics of not how but whether to represent political philosophers as canonical. Despite these questions, Sapiro exemplifies how one can begin to disassemble canons prudently and skillfully. And she advertises this skill with precision and a sense of craftsmanship. One more advertisement: kudos to the University of Chicago Press for placing asterisks next to the citations where the author has added textual commentary to points that advance arguments she makes in the body of the work. I hope they will continue to do so, and that other publishers will follow suit. ERIC GORHAM Loyola University, New Orleans Joan Weiner. Frege in Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 199o. Pp. xvii + 307 . $32.50. The dominant interpretation of Frege's philosophy makes him out to be a recognizably analytic philosopher whose views on mathematics and language rest upon a Platonistic basis. His philosophical project is generally thoughtto have significant metaphysical implications. He is taken to have argued for the need to posit abstract entities in order to provide a semantics for ordinary language and to explain the nature of numbers. In this book, Joan Weiner challenges this interpretation. "My aim," she says, "is to tell a different story about Frege's overall picture by looking at Frege from a greater distance, by stepping back and entertaining the possibility that he is not one of us" (2). Frege's project, she claims, is epistemological rather than metaphysical. "Frege's real purpose is to make clear, from within his epistemological perspective, how it is that we can have knowledge of the truths of arithmetic" (99). The epistemological perspective that Frege adopts is derived from Kant's distinctions between judgments that are analytic and synthetic and judgments that are a priori and a posteriori. These distinctions constitute a theory about the ultimate grounds ofjustification of various classes of judgments. But instead of arguing with Kant that the justification of arithmetic is 644 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:4 OCTOBER 1993 founded upon intuition, Frege claims that the truths of arithmetic can be shown to be analytic by deriving them them logic, whose truths are immediately evident from their content (75, 78)9To make out his case, Frege modifies Kant's framework by replacing Aristotelian logic with his new logic. According to Weiner, Frege did not aim at making his case by analyzing the content of our everyday arithmetic but by replacing it with "a systematic science of pure logic" (129). It is not correct that Frege was concerned with the semantics of everyday language. "His concern is with replacing everyday language with a more perfect instrument" (265). In fact, says Weiner, Frege's distinction between Sinn and Bedeutungwas not intended to apply to natural language. For a term to have Bedeutung,"it suffices to show that it is either primitive or definable in the appropriate way from primitive terms." Thus his use of "Bedeutung""should not be conflated with our contemporary use of "reference" (130). In Frege's perspective, there is no need to explain how words "hook onto extralinguistic entities" 09 o) so there is no role for reference...