Wittgenstein's “Great Debt” To Frege
Abstract
It is well known that Frege and his writings were an important influence on Wittgenstein. There is no agreement, however, on the nature and scope of this influence. In this paper, I clarify the situation in three related ways: by tracing Frege's and Wittgenstein's actual interactions, i.e., their face‐to‐face meetings and their correspondence between 1911 and 1920; by documenting Wittgenstein's continued study of Frege's writings, until the very end of his life in 1951; and by constructing, on that basis, a new framework for understanding the themes that connect Wittgenstein to Frege, both in his early and his later works.