A German mathematician, Frege spent his career at the University of Jena and created modern logic. He wanted to show that arithmetic derives from logic alone and fought the idea that numbers are ideas in the mind. Little read in his lifetime, he later became the father of analytic philosophy, influencing Russell and Wittgenstein.
Core ideas
Arithmetic can be derived from purely logical laws, without support from experience
Numbers and thoughts are objective: they exist independently of the minds that think them
Sense and reference differ: two expressions can point to the same object in different ways
The tradition: Logicism
Logicism holds that mathematics reduces to logic and that its truths are known by reason. Frege is the founder of this line and the creator of the formal logic that made it possible.
