On Frege’s Legacy in the Later Wittgenstein and Brandom
Abstract
It is generally accepted that Frege is a powerful logician who created completely original tools for analysis which have become the firm ground on which 20th Century logic and analytical philosophy is built, however indirect his influence might be. His specific attempts to construct the foundations of arithmetic, however, are frequently judged to be ill–conceived and no more nowadays than a curiosity of 19th Century philosophy. In the light of scepticism that there is anything left to share after Wittgenstein's criticism of Frege both in the Tractatus and in Philosophical Investigations, as expressed in particular by P.M.S. Hacker, it is the aim of this paper, first, to show that there is a strand of philosophical thinking that runs from Kant to Frege to Wittgenstein which is worth exploring and developing: Robert B. Brandom's enterprise of rational pragmatism and inferential semantics is one outstanding example for developing original philosophical thought based on the conviction that Frege's inheritance is very much alive and worthwhile exploring, along with Kant's, Hegel's and Wittgenstein's, among others. The aim of this paper is, secondly, to explore the seemingly divergent routs some aspects of Frege's legacy take when reworked by Wittgenstein and Brandom, and further if and how, respectively, these divergences might be seen, after all, as nothing more than local ramifications of one continuous stream of philosophy.
References
Baker, Gordon P., Peter. M. S. Hacker (1984). Frege: Logical Excavations. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press/Basil Blackwell
Brandom, Robert (1994). Making it Explicit [MIE]. Cambridge, MASS.: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, Robert (2008). Between Saying and Doing [BSD]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199542871.001.0001
Brandom, Robert B. (2019). «Some Strands of Wittgenstein’s Normative Pragmatism, and Some Strains of his Semantic Nihilism». Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin 8, no. 9: pp. 00-00.
Fairhurst, Jordi (2019). «Morals, meaning and truth in Wittgenstein and Brandom». Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin 8, no. 9: pp. 00–00.
Frápolli, María José «Reivindicando el proyecto de Frege. La prioridad de las proposiciones y el carácter expresivo de la lógica». Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin 6:7 (2017), pp. 1-42.
Frege, Gottlob (1976). Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel Gottfried Gabriel, Hans Hermes, Friedrich Kambartel, Christian Thiel, Albert Veraart, ed.; Hamburg: Meiner.
Frege, Gottlob (1983). Nachgelassene Schriften. Unter Mitwirkung von Gottfried Gabriel und Walburga Rödding bearbeitet, eingeleitet und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Hans Hermes, Friedrich Kambartel und Friedrich Kaulbach (= Gottlob Frege. Nachgelassene Schriften und wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, Bd. 1), zweite, erweiterte Auflage. Hamburg: Meiner.
Frege, Gottlob (1893/1903/2009). Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I/II [GGA]. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag.
Geach, Peter (1965). “Assertion”. The Philosophical Review, vol. 74, no. 4: pp. 449–465. doi: 10.2307/2183123.
Geach, Peter (1993). “Wittgenstein on Names”. In A Wittgenstein Symposium. J. M. Terricabras (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 67–76
Glock, Hanns-Johann., John Hymann, ed. (2009). Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy. Essays for P. M. S. Hacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Hacker, Peter M. S. (2001). Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies. Oxford: Clarendon. Available at Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2005. doi: 10.1093/019924569X.001.0001
Hacker, Peter M. S. (2001a). “Frege and the Early Wittgenstein”. In Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 191–218. Available at Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2005. doi: 10.1093/019924569X.001.0001
Hacker, Peter M. S. (2001b). “Frege and the Later Wittgenstein”. In Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 219–241. Available at Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2005. doi: 10.1093/019924569X.001.0001
McDowell, John (2019). «How Not to Read Philosophical Investigations: Brandom’s Wittgenstein». Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin 8, no. 9: pp. 00–00.
Reck, Erich H. (1997). Shortened version of “Frege’s Influence on Wittgenstein: Reversing Metaphysics via the Context Principle”, in Early Analytic Philosophy, W.W. Tait, ed., Open Court, Chicago, pp. 123-85, downloaded on 23/02/2019 at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a5e1/f41223452caf0775fe03ed08417e3530a9b8.pdf
Reck, Erich H. (2002). “Wittgenstein’s ‘Great Debt’ to Frege: Biographical Traces and Philosophical Themes” in From Frege to Wittgenstein Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy. Erich H. Reck, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/0195133269.003.0001
Sluga, Hans (1980). Gottlob Frege. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Tolksdorf, Stefan (2008). “Wittgenstein, Brandom und der analytische Pragmatismus”. In: From the ALWS archives: A selection of papers from the International Wittgenstein Symposia in Kirchberg am Wechsel <http://wab.uib.no/agora-alws/>. Republication by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 2013. Original publication in: Papers of the 31st IWS: Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences (eds. Alexander Hieke, Hannes Leitgeb). Kirchberg am Wechsel: ALWS 2008, pp. 404–408
Wischin, Kurt (2017). «La justificación de las inferencias. Frege y el Tractatus 5.132». Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin vol. 6, no. 7, pp. 385-421.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922/1963) Tractatus logico–philosophicus. Logisch–philosophische Abhandlung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953/2009). Philosophical Investigations. Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Malden, Oxford and Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley–Blackwell.
Copyright (c) 2019 Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
