Abstract

A detailed argument is provided for the thesis that Dedekind was a logicist about arithmetic. The rules of inference employed in Dedekind's construction of arithmetic are, by his lights, all purely logical in character, and the definitions are all explicit; even the definition of the natural numbers as the abstract type of simply infinite systems can be seen to be explicit. The primitive concepts of the construction are logical in their being intrinsically tied to the functioning of the understanding.