The Philosopher behind the Last Logicist

Abstract

In Frege: The Last Logicist, Paul Benacerraf highlights two important features of Frege's work. One is the peculiarity, from a contemporary perspective, of Frege's enterprise, and the other is the influence of Frege's mathematical background on this enterprise. Benacerraf points out, quite rightly, that Frege is not a contemporary of ours and that any careful reader of Frege's Gl will see that Frege's concerns do not seem to be current philosophical concerns. The appropriate way to read Frege's works, Benacerraf argues, is to take into account their historical context. And, in his paper, Benacerraf tries to read Frege in this way. A part of the historical context, of course, is that Frege was trained as a mathematician, not a philosopher. Benacerraf leans heavily on this in his reading of Frege's work. He argues that Frege's motivation for writing Gl was primarily mathematical and that Frege viewed Gl as incidentally a philosophical (p. 33). Although this approach seems promising, Benacerraf's reading is surprisingly unsatisfying for, on it, Frege's work seems less deep and interesting than it is generally taken to be. I want to argue that Benacerrafs reading is not only unsatisfying but wrong. But although I think it wrong, I also think that Benacerraf's paper merits careful examination. For Benacerraf's reading seems to spring from an understanding of, and attempt to grapple with, certain fundamental tensions in Frege's view. Careful attention to those passages which seem to contradict the thrust of Benacerraf's reading will provide a key to understanding how Frege viewed his work and the sense in which some of Frege's writings can be viewed as responses to fundamental tensions in Gl. The upshot of Benacerraf's reading is that Frege's motivation is really very simple. Frege's project, Benacerraf says, is to prove the heretofore unproved (but provable) truths of arithmetic. And the motivation for undertaking this project is straightforwardly mathematical Frege is simply interested in giving some new proofs. But while it is entirely plausible that someone might have this motivation for undertaking the project just described, it is less plausible that