Abstract

Gottlob Frege is often called a "platonist". In connection with his philosophy we can talk about platonism concerning three kinds of entities: numbers, or logical objects more generally; concepts, or functions more generally; thoughts, or senses more generally. I will only be concerned about the first of these three kinds here, in particular about the natural numbers. I will also focus mostly on Frege's corresponding remarks in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), supplemented by a few asides on Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893/1903) and "Thoughts" (1918). My goal is to clarify in which sense the Frege of Foundations and Basic Laws is a platonist concerning the natural numbers.1..