Frege and Frege Interpreters (Research Seminar, 10 sessões) Prof. Charles Travis (King's College, London) Project The Bounds of Judgement (PTDC/FIL-FIL/108992/2009)
De 23-09-2011 a 09-12-2011
Organizado por Sofia Miguens, João Alberto Pinto e Susana Cadilha
Leccionado por Charles Travis
FREGE SEMINAR PORTO 2011
This will not be a comprehensive treatment of Frege?s philosophy, nor of his logic. The aim is to develop one side of Frege which I think is under-appreciated. As a title for the organising them, I have chosen The Invisibility of Thoughts. The first two seminars (at least) will develop what I mean by that, and what its main significance is. I will then use this as a background to discuss some standard main themes in Frege, most notably these: the distinction between sense and reference; the distinction between concept and object; truth. In addition I will try to discuss some recent commentaries on Frege. Most of these are found in the Cambridge Companion to Frege. Most notable are those by Peter Sullivan, Warren Goldfarb, Tom Ricketts and Cora Diamond. I will also discuss several essays by Cora Diamond in her The Realistic Spirit, notably ?Frege on Nonsense?, ?What Nonsense Might Be?, and ?Frege Against Fuzz?.
It is difficult to approach Frege work by work. The points I want to emphasise are scattered, mostly throughout the Nachlass. To begin with, it will be relevant to read his ?letter to Marty? (1882), notes for Ludwig Darmstädter (1919), ?17 Kernsätze zur Logik?, and also ?Der Gedanke?. I will also mention ?Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand?, though, of course, not (the first week) because of the concept-object distinction. For future weeks I will try to mention main works in advance, and will also try to extract and distribute at the seminar some most important quotes. If you can, read the German. If you want English, you could get Beaney, though he often offers only extracts, or look at other standard translations, e.g., Geach for ?The Thought?. I don?t know the situation in other languages.
What follows is a list of topics in the order we will approach them. I doubt that these will be one per week. Some, maybe many, will take longer. I hope to get fairly far into things before looking at other Frege commentators, so this may be a separate section at the end.
I. Exploiting The Invisibility of Thoughts (background)
A. The point of invisibility. (Contrast Wittgenstein and Russell)
B. Taking whole thoughts first.
1. What this means. Arriving at concepts by decomposing thoughts. (A thought: what brings truth into question at all)
2. Logical structure of thoughts: multiple decompositionability. What is a decomposition? (Here we will read Sullivan, ?Dummett?s Frege?.)
C. The generality of thoughts, finding generality, the distinction between the general and the particular (conceptual and nonconceptual)
D. The essential publicity of thoughts, and of their subject matter. Objectivity, independence of a judgement from what is judged.
II. The Distinction Between Sense and Reference.
A. This is something like the distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual, but not just like. How not?
B. What is sense?
C. Does Frege sometimes conflate two different notions, or fail to distinguish two (or more) notions of sense? What happens in ?Einleitung in der Logik? (1906) (and correspondence with Russell).
III. Concept and Object. (At this point we will want to read Ricketts and Diamond)
A. Why is there a problem?
B. Can there be this problem?
C. How else can we think of a concept-object distinction? And how fundamental is it anyway?
IV. Truth. Why Frege is not a minimalist.
V. Objectivity and the autonomy of logic. (Here we will read Goldfarb)
VI. Formalisation and definition
