By drawing attention to these facts and to the relationship between Cantor’s and Husserl's ideas, I have tried to contribute to putting Frege's attack on Husserl "in the proper light" by providing some insight into some of the issues underling criticisms which Frege himself suggested were not purely aimed at Husserl's book. I have tried to undermine the popular idea that Frege's review of the Philosophy of Arithmetic is a straightforward, objective assessment of Husserl’s book, and to give some specific (...) reasons for thinking that the uncritical reading of Frege's review has unfairly distorted philosophers' perception of a work they do not know very well. (shrink)

I shall attempt in what follows to show how mereology, taken together with certain topological notions, can yield the basis for future investigations in formal ontology. I shall attempt to show also how the mereological framework here advanced can allow the direct and natural formulation of a series of theses – for example pertaining to the concept of boundary – which can be formulated only indirectly (if at all) in set-theoretic terms.

The best known and most widely discussed aspect of Kurt Gödel's philosophy of mathematics is undoubtedly his robust realism or platonism about mathematical objects and mathematical knowledge. This has scandalized many philosophers but probably has done so less in recent years than earlier. Bertrand Russell's report in his autobiography of one or more encounters with Gödel is well known:Gödel turned out to be an unadulterated Platonist, and apparently believed that an eternal “not” was laid up in heaven, where virtuous logicians (...) might hope to meet it hereafter.On this Gödel commented:Concerning my “unadulterated” Platonism, it is no more unadulterated than Russell's own in 1921 when in the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy … he said, “Logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.” At that time evidently Russell had met the “not” even in this world, but later on under the infuence of Wittgenstein he chose to overlook it.One of the tasks I shall undertake here is to say something about what Gödel's platonism is and why he held it.A feature of Gödel's view is the manner in which he connects it with a strong conception of mathematical intuition, strong in the sense that it appears to be a basic epistemological factor in knowledge of highly abstract mathematics, in particular higher set theory. Other defenders of intuition in the foundations of mathematics, such as Brouwer and the traditional intuitionists, have a much more modest conception of what mathematical intuition will accomplish. (shrink)

One hundred years ago Gottlob Frege published a damaging, abusive review of Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic. Although rather a lot has now been written abound Frege’s review and the role it might have played in the development of Husserl’s thought, much still remains to be rectified regarding Frege’s assessment of the book and the credence his review has been accorded. Philosophers have generally been all too willing to trust Frege’s judgment, and so all too ready to dismiss Husserl’s book (...) as irredeemably muddled. (shrink)

Frege's semantics of sense and reference and two husserlian alternatives are discussed. it is shown that husserl neither took his semantics of sense and reference from frege nor abandoned psychologism under his influence. frege's arguments on behalf of his choice of truth values as the reference of statements and of concepts as the reference of conceptual words are submitted to criticism. some algebraic considerations are sketched in the last part of the article.

The concept of formal ontology was first developed by Husserl. It concerns problems relating to the notions of object, substance, property, part, whole, predication, nominalization, etc. The idea of formal ontology is present in many of Husserl?s works, with minor changes. This paper provides a reconstruction of such an idea. Husserl?s proposal is faced with contemporary logical orthodoxy and it is presented also an interpretative hypothesis, namely that the original difference between the general perspective of usual model theory and formal (...) ontology is grounded in the fact that this latter starts from an intended interpretation and not from the set of all the possible interpretations. (shrink)

Frege had not one but two different notions of sense, namely, that of ?Über Sinn und Bedeutung? and one implicit in a letter to Husserl of 1906 and elsewhere. This last one originates in Frege's notion of conceptual content. The distinction is used to clarify some obscurities in Frege's thought. In the last section a sort of ?explicans? of Frege's notion of conceptual content is introduced and applied to the semantic analysis of mathematics.

Matthias Schirn (ed.), Frege:Importance and Legacy, Berlin, Walter De Gruyter, 1996, viii + 466pp.

Husserl’s refutation of psychologism one hundred years ago in his opus mag-num Logische Untersuchungen is a painfully detailed enterprise. After justi-fying the existence of logic as a separate practical discipline, Husserl first shows that normative and a fortiori practical disciplines are founded on theoretical ones. He then formulates the psychologistic theses, extracts empirical consequences from them and shows how psychologism distorts the content of logical laws. The nucleus of the refutation consists in six arguments showing that specific relativism and, in (...) particu-lar, anthropologism is a form of skepticism, and, finally, establishing that psycholo-gism is a specific relativism, an anthropologism. A more direct and brief refutation follows, in which Husserl brings to the fore the prejudices on which psychologism is based. (shrink)

E. Husserl, Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Vorlesungen 1917/18, mit ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung 1910/11. (Husserliana, 30.) Introduction by U. Panzer. Dordrecht:Kluwer, 1996. lxii + 554 pp. £130. ISBN0 792 33731 X D. Jacquette, Meinongian logic. The semantics of existence and nonexistence. Berlin and New York:Walter de Gruyter, 1996. xiii + 297 pp. DM 198. ISBN 3 11 014865 X M. Beaney (ed. and introduced), The Frege Reader. Blackwell Publishers, 1997. xv + 409 pp. £14.99/$21.95 (pbk). ISBN 0 631 (...) 194 452 Elliott Mendelson, Introduction to formal logic, fourth edition. London:Chapman & Hall, 1997. x + 440 pp. £45.00. ISBN 1 412 808307 Samuel Guttenplan, The languages of logic. An introduction to formal logic, second edition. Oxford:Blackwell, 1997. x + 429 pp. No price stated. ISBN 1 55786 988 X A.C. Grayling, An introduction to philosophical logic, third edition. Oxford:Blackwell, 1997. vii + 343 pp. £15.99/$27.99. ISBN 0 631 19982 9 Lewis Carroll, Das Spiel der Logik. Edited with an afterword by P. Good. Translated by M.Zöllner. Cologne:Propen Verlag/frommann-holzboog, 1997. 120pp. 32 DM. ISBN 3 7728 1998 2. (shrink)