On the First Flowering of Frege's Reputation

72 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY should be glad to know where the Author could be met with if a lazy Umbratiek, very averse to motion, ever takes a ramble in a vacation34 I am Sir Your most obliged and most obedient humble servt FRANCIS HUTCHESON IAN Ross University o] British Columbia ~ The recluse did not visit Hume, as far as is known, and Hume is believed to have made a special trip to Glasgow in the winter of 1739-1740to see Hutcheson (Mossner, p. 135). ON THE FIRST FLOWERING OF FREGE'S REPUTATION WHEN GOTTLOBFREGE died in 1925 at Bad Kleinen (Mecklenburg) at the age of eighty-five, his passing was unmarked by the scholarly world. In this respect, his death was characteristic of his life. For in spite of the fact that he was, as Alonzo Church puts it, "the greatest logician of modern times," his work was either unknown to, or ignored by, his contemporaries. Why this should have been so defeats explanation. Indeed, it is difficult to find an exactly comparable case anywhere in the history of philosophy. Men of genius who led secluded lives invariably had at least a local reputation (Spinoza, for example); the typical rediscovered figure (like Alexander Bryan Johnson) inevitably turns out to be talented but second rate. C. S. Peirce is perhaps the philosopher who comes closest to fitting this mold; but even here there are sharp differences. At least Peirce could write of himself, "I am a man of whom the critics have never found anything good to say," 1 while Frege's typical lament runs as follows: "In vain do we seek notice of my Grundlagen der Arithmetik in the Jahrbuch i~ber die Fortschritte der Mathematik . Researchers in the same area, Dedekind, Otto Stolz, von Helmholtz, seem not to be aware of my works. And Kronecker fails to mention them in his essay on the concept of number." 2 Moreover, unlike Peirce, Frege occupied a senior academic position in a respectable university (Jena). He was born in a century, and in a country, dedicated to intensive research in just the areas of his own mathematical concerns; he contributed to a variety of journals over a period of forty years; and he published three major books during his lifetime. Yet these products of genius, though readily at hand, were virtually ignored. Frege's first book, the Begrif]scri]t, appeared in 1879. It was his third publication and represented a creative achievement of an order which has recently led William Kneale to say of it, "It is not unfair either to his predecessors or to his successors to say that 1879 is the most important date in the history of the subleer ," and I. M. Bochenski to remark that "Frege's Begri#schrift is comparable in 1Philosophical Writings o] Peirce,ed. J. Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 3. 2Gottlob Frege, The BasicLaws o] Arithmetic, ed. Montgomery Furth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1964), p. 8, ~ootnote. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 73 importance with only one other book in the entire history of logic, Aristotle's Prior Analytics." Begri~schri]t contains the first fully formalized axiomatic treatment of that part of logic called "the propositional calculus" or "the sentential calculus." In carrying out the formalization, Frege uses two primitive notions, negation and (truth-functional) implication, six axioms, and two rules of inference , substitution and modus ponens. Not only is this system consistent and complete , but with the addition of further axioms and rules, Frege showed how it could be expanded into a complete system of the first order functional (or predicate ) calculus. With this great work, modern logic begins; yet it was reviewed only four times (by R. Hoppe and K. Lasswitz in 1879, by C. T. Michaels in 1880, and by Ernst SchrSder in 1881) and was then forgotten. Up to 1964, no one had made a complete translation of it into English. Frege's second masterpiece, Grundlagen der Arithmetik, was published in 1884 and suffered an even worse fate at the non-existent hands of non-existent critics. In the solitary mention it was to receive during Frege's creative lifetime, it was given a one...