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FREGE IN TWO DIMENSIONS
Резюме. The review outlines the content of Kamen Lozev's book In the Eve, Or the Other Revolution: Gottlob Frege, 2019. The paper emphasizes that for the first time in the Bulgarian philosophical literature an attempt is made to present an extended portrayal of Frege as a revolutionary figure in both fields – Logic and Philosophy of language. The aim of the review is to help future readers of Kamen Lozev's book better comprehend the necessary connection between Frege's logical investigations and his inevitable discoveries in Semantics. Lozev's book argues that during the years of 'the eve' (end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth century) along with the revolution in Natural sciences another revolution, started by Frege and no less important, was well underway which gave in, the end, the Twentieth century philosophy its most dominant trend – the Analytic philosophy.
Ключови думи: Gottlob Frege; modern logic; Philosophy of language; Analytic philosophy
Lozev, K. (2019). A Review of "In the Eve, or the Other Revolution: Gottlob Frege".
Blagoevgrad: BON. ISBN 978-954-395-228-1, 228 p.
The new book of Dr. Lozev (Lozev, 2019) on Gottlob Frege aims to fill in a specific empty niche of the contemporary philosophical literature in Bulgaria. To date no attempts have been made to give in a book form a systematic portrayal of Gottlob Frege both as a logician, founder of Modern logic introduced in his first work Begriffsschrift (Concept Script/Notation), 1879, and a philosopher, grandfather of Analytical philosophy who first introduced the famous Context principle in his second book Die Grundlagen der Arithmetic (The Foundations of Arithmetic), 1884, and in the words of Michael Dummett carried out the ‘linguistic turn’ enabling the analysis of thought through analysis of language (Dummett, 1993: 4).
Dr. Lozev’s book engages itself with investigating the two aspects of Frege’s revolution in order to show its complex nature, on the one side, and also to reveal why it was necessary for Frege to indulge not only in logico-mathematical research but to delve into the field of Philosophy of language carrying it forward to its new phase of development, on the other. The book is an interesting and engaging narrative of the two revolutions initiated by Frege unfolding the subtleties of his thought and the ingenuity of the principles he invented and masterly applied.
In the Introduction to his book Dr. Lozev tells us that one of the driving incentives to write the book had been his intention to provide an answer to the question why and how was it possible that a mathematician and a logician of the caliber of Frege managed to start, in the ‘eve’ of the Twentieth century, a ‘revolution’ in Philosophy of language which gave birth to one of the most dominant philosophical trends of the Twentieth century philosophy - the Analytical philosophy. By and large, the answer Lozev provides lies in the fact that the fundamental discoveries of Frege in the field of logic, set forth in Chapter two, incessantly drove Frege to face the fundamental issues related to understanding and the logical aspects of thinking. Given his conviction, right from the start of his career (cf. Lozev, 2018b: 137) that thought can be accessed only through language, it becomes obvious why Frege had to act like a philosopher of language and why he so significantly contributed to that field. Here and in a previous paper on Frege’s achievements (cf. Lozev, 2018a) Lozev emphasizes that it was the philosophical depth of Frege’s logical research which enabled him to go beyond Bull’s and Schroeder’s symbolic logic and in direct opposition to Aristotle to lay down his new logic, as he then called it.
The second Fregean revolution, the revolution in the Philosophy of language with its two stages, is in detail set out in Chapters three and four.
Summa summarum, we can highly appreciate Dr. Lozev’s book as a very successful one on the basis of a specific indicator: after finishing the book the reader is gripped with the feeling that he has attained a picture of the ‘synthesized’ Frege, that is of the revolutionary Frege in the fields of logic and philosophy. The other feeling which the reader by necessity gets is that the book will be a useful read on the desk of every student in Philosophy, Logic or Mathematics.
REFERENCES
Dummett, M. (1993). Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lozev, K. (2019). In the Eve, Or the Other Revolution: Gottlob Frege. Blagoevgrad: BON.
Lozev, K. (2018a). On the Title of the First Book of Frege. Nota bene, Issue 41.
Lozev, K. (2018b). The Linguistic Turn and the Birth of Logical Analysis of language: Gottlob Frege (1891 – 1895). Philosophical alternatives, Issue 1, 136 – 153.