Frege, Rusell, and Wittgenstein (teaching)
Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson's Homepage
Topics
Topic: Frege on Sense and Reference
Essay Question:
Expound Frege's notions of sinn (sense) and bedeutung (reference/meaning) taking proper names as a an example. How is Frege's distinction supposed to deal with coreference? Do you think it is successful?
Readings:
- Frege, G.
- 'On Sinn and Bedeutung', 'On Concept and Object', 'Thoughts', and 'Compound Thoughts', all of which may be found in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. B. McGuiness, tr. M. Black, et. al. Blackwell, (1984).
- Beany, M. (1996): Frege: Making Sense, Duckworth.
- Dummet, M. (1993): Frege: Philosophy of Language, ch. 1 (ch. 2-7 are relevant also), Harvard University Press.
Topic: Frege on Concept and Object
Essay Question:
Frege declares that never losing sight of the distinction between concept and object is one of three fundamental principles he kept to in the Foundations (Introduction, p. X ). Expound Frege’s distinction between concept and object and assess its importance for his Foundations of Arithmetic.
Readings:
- Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic: a logico-mathematical enquiry into the concept of number (1884), English translation by J.L. Austin B.H. Blackwell, Oxford, revised edn 1953, §§ 46-53, the footnote in §66, and §97.
- Gottlob Frege, “Function and concept” (1891), English translation by P.T. Geach, Peter Geach and Max Black (eds), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1960, pp. 21-41, or Brian McGuinness (ed), Gottlob Frege Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, Basil Blackwell, 1984, pp. 137-156.
- Gottlob Frege, “On concept and object” (1892), English translation by P.T. Geach, Geach and Black (eds), op. cit., pp. 42-55; McGuinness (ed), op. cit., pp. 182-194.
- Tyler Burge, “Frege on extensions of concepts 1884-1903”, Philosophical Review 93 (1984), pp. 3-34.
- Anthony Kenny, “Function, concept and object”, Chapter 6 of Frege: An Introduction to the Founder of Modern Analytic Philosophy, Penguin Books, 1995, pp. 100-125.
- Harold Noonan, “Function and concept” and “On concept and object”, Chapter 4 of Frege: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 133-167.
- Joan Weiner, “Function and concept” and “On concept and object”, Frege, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 72-90, 105-116.
Topic: Russell
Essay Question:
Expound Russell's theory of denoting phrases. Do you think that it is successful? Why?
Readings:
- The special issue of Mind: '100 Years on 'On Denoting', volume 114, 456, October 2005 contains Russell's original paper, an excellent introduction by Stephen Neale, and nine papers on the topic by Kripke and Kaplan etc. All of these are relevant.
- If your inside the Oxford network you should be able to access the issue here.
Topic: Wittgenstein
Essay Question:
"All the propositions of logic say the same thing, viz nothing. They are tautologies" (Tractatus, 4.46, 6.1). Discuss.
Readings:
- Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
- Frege, G. : 'Compound Thoughts', found in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. B. McGuiness, tr. M. Black, et. al. Blackwell, (1984).
- Bar-Hillel, Y., and Carnap, R. (1952): An Outline of a Theory of Semantic Information, §1, rep. in Bar-Hillel (ed.) Language and Information: Selected Essays on Their Theory and Application, Addison-Wesley, (1964) pp. 221-74.
- Hintikka, J. (1973): Logic, Language Games, and Information, ch. VII (Are Logical Truths Tautologies?), Clarendon, Oxford.
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