Matthias Wille.* ›Largely unknown‹ Gottlob Frege und der posthume Ruhm ›alles in den Wind geschrieben‹ Gottlob Frege wider den Zeitgeist

Abstract

In 1908, Gottlob Frege had to conclude that not even his colleague at Jena for almost thirty years, Carl Johannes Thomae, had been able, or willing, to appreciate his repeated criticism both of formalism and of the doctrine of numbers as collections of identical yet different units obtained by abstraction. Frege may have regarded the controversy with Thomae as emblematic of his standing among his peers: misunderstood by the few who had not neglected him altogether. Little more than forty years later, Frege was on the verge of canonization in the analytical tradition through the publication of translations of his work by Austin, Geach, and Black and the inclusion of ‘On sense and nominatum’ in the anthology Readings in Philosophical Analysis [Feigl and Sellars, 1949]. In two fine books, Matthias Wille recounts the reception of Frege’s work: from 1879 until the controversy with Thomae in the most recently published one (Wille, 2020), and from Russell’s Principles of Mathematics [1903] until the publication of The Foundations of Arithmetic [1950] in the book published four years ago (Wille, 2016). This earlier book should be of interest to all students of the history of analytic philosophy or modern logic. The question of how a man whose death did not prompt a single obituary could, within twenty-five years, obtain world renown both as logician and philosopher has, it appears, been dealt with in print only once before; and, as Wille shows, Stroll’s [1966] answer is in need of supplementation and revision. Also the more recent book has much to offer, though perhaps mainly to the Frege specialist. It impresses especially by its wealth of new information on two of Frege’s publishers.