CHiPhi History of Analytic Philosophy Workshop

Programme

Bowland Lecture Theatre (Berrick Saul Building)

10.30 Mark Textor: ‘Bolzano on conceptual truths and their grounds, or how logicism got started’

11.45 Coffee

12.00 Michael Potter: ‘Is there a willing subject in the Tractatus?’

1.15 Lunch 

Berrick Saul Seminar Room 007: Workshop on Frege

2.30 Erich Reck: ‘Frege’s Project: Rationalist Analysis or Pragmatist Explication?’

3.30 Philip Ebert: ‘Frege’s Project: Reply to Reck’

4.30 Wine reception

Abstracts

Mark Textor: ‘Bolzano on conceptual truths and their grounds or how logicism got started’

When proposing that arithmetic is a branch of logic that has no grounds in experience and intuition, Frege, writes Dummett, ‘was following in the footsteps of Bolzano’. In my talk I will outline the footsteps Frege followed. I will introduce Bolzano's distinction between intuitive and conceptual truths and discuss their philosophical role in motivating the logicist thesis.

Michael Potter: ‘Is there a willing subject in the Tractatus?’

In the 1916 notebook the willing subject seems to be central to Wittgenstein's account of ethics. Yet in the Tractatus we are told that "of the will as the subject of the ethical we cannot speak". So what happened to the willing subject in the meantime, and why?

Erich Reck: ‘Frege’s Project: Rationalist Analysis or Pragmatist Explication?’

With his investigation into the foundations of arithmetic and his related introduction of general quantificational logic, Frege made lasting contributions to logic and the philosophy of mathematics.  He also influenced the rise of ‘analytic philosophy’ decisively.  At the same time, there is some disagreement in the literature about what Frege’s project actually was, in the sense of whether he meant it to result in a strong and rationalist form of analysis, or instead, in a weaker and more pragmatist kind of explication. I will address this disagreement, both by clarifying what is at issue in it systematically and by attempting to come to a resolution interpretively.