Abstract

Gottlob Frege was trained as a mathematician, engaged in disputes with mathematicians throughout his career, and wrote almost exclusively about the nature of logic and mathematics. Thus it does not seem at all unreasonable to assume, as many philosophers have, that Frege's philosophical interests grew out of his mathematical concerns. But I believe that this assumption is mistaken, I argue that Frege's philosophical work should be regarded as having grown out of the Kantian tradition and that the motivation for this work can only be found by looking carefully at what Frege says about Kant. Frege believed that Kantian epistemology was more or less correct, but flawed, and his project was to make Kantian epistemology, as he understood it, work. The key to the development of Frege's project can be found in his interpretation of Kant's notion of analyticity and the role of logic. Frege followed Kant in understanding logic as the science of the formal rules of all thought. But, while Kant assumed that traditional Aristotelian logic set out the formal rules of thought, Frege came to the conclusion that this was mistaken. Frege created his logic, the Begriffsschrift, to replace traditional logic in Kantian epistemology. However, as a result of this substitution, the analytic/synthetic distinction, as Kant explicitly formulated it, could not play the role which, on Frege's interpretation, it needed to play. To make his Kantian epistemology work, then, Frege needed to reformulate the distinction. But upon fitting his reformulated distinction into his Kantian picture, Frege ran into still more serious philosophical problems. My project is to read Frege's work as an attempt to salvage his version of Kantian epistemology given these problems