Logic and the inexpressible in Frege and Heidegger

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 89-113

  Witherspoon, Edward ^a  

^a Center for Language and Brain

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950116136     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2002.0021     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. "What is Metaphysics?", David Farrell Krell, trans., in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, William NcNeill, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92.
2. Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, Terrence Malick, trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 83-5.
3. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Michael Heim, trans. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 19. In subsequent quotations I will occasionally modify Heim's translation.
4. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 104.
5. P. T. Geach, trans., in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, P. T. Geach and M. Black, eds., 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Hereafter cited as "CO."
6. Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, J. L. Austin, trans., 2nd rev. ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980), x.
7. see Anthony Palmer, Concept and Object [New York: Routledge, 1988].) But for the purposes of my comparison of Frege and Heidegger the most important thing is to note that Frege himself (rightly or wrongly) thought that the paradox is inevitable because it is inherent in language itself.
8. Michael Friedman's interpretation of Heidegger suggests a further respect in which Heidegger would have regarded Frege's inquiry as of secondary importance. Friedman portrays Heidegger in Being and Time as coming to terms with a problem he inherited from the neo-Kantian tradition (especially as embodied in Heinrich Rickert), namely, the problem of explaining how laws from the atemporal, ideal realm of logic can apply to actual, temporal thinking about concrete objects. Frege (whom Freidman does not discuss in connection with Heidegger) was comparatively unmoved by the neo-Kantian problem of explaining logic's connection with thinking. See Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000).
9. Frege, Posthumous Writings, 177-8 (my interpolation).
10. Immanuel Kant, Logic, Robert S. Hartmann and Wolfgang Schwarz, trans. (New York: Dover, 1974). 14.
11. Frege, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Montgomery Furth, trans. and ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 12.
12. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, x.
13. The critic I am envisioning is the early Wittgenstein portrayed in James Conant, "The Search for Logically Alien Thought," Philosophical Topics 20 (1991): 115-80,
14. and his "Frege and Early Wittgenstein," in Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein (New York: Routledge, 2000),