Frege and the Later Wittgenstein

Summary

Preliminaries

In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein acknowledged ‘Frege's great works’ as one of the two primary stimulations for his thoughts. Throughout his life he admired Frege both as a great thinker and as a great stylist. This much is indisputable. What is disputable is how he viewed his own philosophical work in relation to Frege's and, equally, how we should view his work in this respect. Some followers of Frege are inclined to think that Wittgenstein's work builds on or complements that of Frege. If that were true it would be plausible to suppose that the joint legacy of these two great philosophers can provide a coherent foundation for our own endeavours. But it is debatable whether their fundamental ideas can be synthesized thus. The philosophy of Wittgenstein, both early and late, is propounded to a very large extent in opposition to Frege's. They can no more be mixed than oil and water – or so I shall argue.

Frege's logical works did indeed stimulate the young Wittgenstein's thoughts. His formalization of the propositional and predicate calculi was the most momentous advance in formal logic since Aristotle. In many ways it, together with Russell's and Whitehead's Principia, set the agenda for twentieth-century philosophy of logic and for modern philosophical reflection on the relation between logical calculi, thought and language.