Frege on Language, Logic, and Psychology: Selected Essays

Description

Eva Picardi (1948-2017) was 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. This volume presents a selection of Picardi's essays 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 Picardi's work on Frege concerns understanding and contextualizing Frege's anti-psychologism. Picardi contends that Frege was motivated by semantic considerations, much more so than by adherence to Kantian transcendentalism. Furthermore, Picardi draws on her deep knowledge of German, and the fact that she was a native speaker of Italian, to reconstruct the intricacies of Frege's relationship with other logicians of his time-both in Germany, like Kerry and Sigwart, and in Italy, like Peano and his school. Picardi's work shows how the historical and the theoretical (typically treated as separate in contemporary analytic philosophy, even in competition), complement and enrich one another. Contents Acknowledgements Credits Complete List of Publications by Eva Picardi Introduction PART I. FREGE IN CONTEXT: LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 1. The Logic of Frege’s Contemporaries 2. Kerry and Frege on Concept and Object 3. Sigwart, Husserl, and Frege on Truth and Logic, or Is Psychologism Still a Threat? 4. Frege’s Anti-Psychologism 5. Frege, Peano, and Russell on the Primitive Ideas of Logic PART II. FREGE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 6. Über Sinn und Bedeutung: An Elementary Exposition 7. The Chemistry of Concepts 8. Assertion and Assertion Sign 9. A Note on Dummett and Frege on Sense Identity 10. Michael Dummett’s Interpretation of Frege’s Context Principle: Some Reflections PART III. FREGE’S LEGACY 11. Carnap Interpreter of Frege 12. Frege and Davidson on Predication 13. Davidson and Frege on the Unity of the Proposition: Some Remarks 14. Was Frege a Proto-Inferentialist? Index of Names Index