Frege on Language, Logic, and Psychology

Abstract

Abstract Eva Picardi has been one of the most influential Italian analytic philosophers of her generation. She taught for forty years at the University of Bologna, raising three generations of students. The present volume is a collection of Picardi’s papers on Frege’s philosophy of logic, language, and psychology. Together, these papers provide a close look at the milieu within which Frege operated and serve to highlight the relevance of his work for contemporary debates, particularly in the philosophy of language. One strand in her work on Frege concerns understanding and contextualizing Frege’s anti-psychologism. Picardi’s contention is that it is much more motivated by semantic considerations than by adherence to Kantian transcendentalism. Furthermore, her deep knowledge of German and the fact that she was a native speaker of Italian put her in a privileged position to reconstruct the intricacies of Frege’s relationship with other logicians of his time, both in Germany, such as Kerry and Sigwart, and in Italy, such as Peano and his school. Picardi’s work in this regard is all the more significant nowadays, as these two dimensions of philosophy—the historical and the theoretical—are typically perceived as separate, if not even in competition with one another, particularly within analytic philosophy itself. Reading Picardi’s work, in contrast, cannot but show that they complement and enrich one another. Such a methodological lesson is the most original and impactful element in Picardi’s legacy and something deeply dear to her heart and constitutive of her identity as a scholar.