Taking Frege at His Word

Download or read book Taking Frege at His Word written by Joan Weiner and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He is thought to have introduced-and made crucial contributions to-the project of giving an account of the workings of natural language. Yet, despite the great admiration most contemporary philosophers feel for Frege, it also is widely believed that he committed a large number of serious, and inexplicable, blunders. If Frege really meant to be constructing a theory of the working of natural language, then a significant number of his stated views-including views he portrayed as central to his philosophical picture-are straightforwardly wrong. But did Frege really mean to be giving an account of the workings of language? He never explicitly said so. And, as Joan Weiner shows in Taking Frege at his Word, if we take seriously Frege's own accounts of what he means to be doing, a very different and exciting philosophical project comes into view. The apparent blunders in his writings turn out not to be blunders at all. Moreover, far from turning Frege's writings into an object of purely antiquarian interest, the Frege Weiner uncovers has on offer new ways of addressing of important contemporary philosophical problems. Book jacket.