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Abstract
Loosely connected reflections on some issues raised by Susanne Bobzien concerning the extent to which Frege interacted with scholars in his environment, and what he may have learned from them. I first note a pattern in Frege's pre-Grundlagen writings: his references to other logicians tend to be in response to criticism. I then discuss the period 1885–1891, suggesting that Frege may have been more engaged with his teaching and his colleagues than is sometimes believed, in response to the ‘unsatisfied need for communication’ that he describes in an 1882 letter. Finally, I explore one of the ways that the influence of Frege's environment may be reflected in the language and philosophical framing he uses to communicated with a philosophical audience, noting the ways that the philosophical language and metaphors of Grundlagen, §88 may have been shaped by Frege's relationship with Rudolf Eucken.
Keywords:
Acknowledgments
An ancestor of this material was presented in a 2022 Eastern Division APA session on Bobzien Citation2021 with Susanne Bobzien and Victor Caston. Thanks to both for a stimulating discussion. I'm additionally grateful to Susanne for many subsequent conversations and comments on drafts. Thanks to David Sullivan and Volker Peckhaus for additional discussions and comments. Thanks to Erich Reck and Volker Peckhaus for conceiving this special issue, and a general thanks to Gottfried Gabriel for his many writings that originally brought Frege's environment to life for me.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Gabriel et al. Citation2009, 372, note a few cases among the many.
2 Bobzien points to affinities between Stoic logic and the 1879 Begriffsschrift as well, but I think those are less striking than the later ones, and are more easily explained as arising from what any attempt to adequately reproduce mathematical reasoning would demand.
3 See Burge Citation1984 and Tappenden Citation2019, 256–7, fn. 56, 57, for example.
4 I'm grateful to Michael Kremer for raising this point. See Kremer Citation2010. My own datings of the material Kremer discusses tend to be later, but it's a complicated issue that I'll leave for elsewhere.
5 In the APA version of this paper I noted that Sigwart's Logic was one bit of Fregean reading I couldn't tie to any antecedent prompt. Susanne Bobzien found a very convincing explanation of the origin and significance of Frege's reading of Sigwart, to appear in forcoming work.
6 I'm grateful to David Sullivan for alerting me to Schlötel's references to Frege, and to Peckhaus Citation1988, Citation2004 for information.
7 Dathe Citation2005, 46, also makes note of Frege's growing isolation, and also suggests that Frege actively re-emerged after a few years, though we differ on some details.
8 Most of the information in this paragraph can be found in Reck and Awodey Citation2004, 18–22.
9 On Bögehold, see Tappenden Citation2011, 98–101.
10 The records reported in Kreiser Citation1995 and Kreiser Citation2001, 306, differ on who the non-Tuch student was in the Dedekind seminar, so I am going with the latter. Nothing hangs on this.
11 In Frege Citation1880/81(?) Frege gives a list of such ‘fruitful concepts’ represented in his system. One of those – the mathematical continuity of a function – is explicitly mentioned in §88.
12 In Kant's words: ‘Strictly speaking, therefore, the organisation of nature is therefore not analogous to any sort of causality that we know […] and is not thinkable and explicable in accordance with any analogy to any physical, i.e. natural capacity that is known to us […]’ (Kant Citation2000, 246–47).
13 A literal translation of the title of the 1878 book is History and Critique of the Fundamental Concepts of the Present.
14 On organic nature in Lotze's and Trendelenburg's philosophy see Beiser Citation2013.
15 Of course, the distinction between ‘proposing a thesis’ and ‘proposing a way to reframe a thesis’ does not have sharp boundaries, but it suffices for present purposes if they make sense as opposite ends of a vague spectrum.