In Michael Beaney & Erich Reck (eds.),
Gottlob Frege: Frege's philosophy of mathematics. London: Routledge. pp. 157-175 (
2005)
Copy
BIBTEX
Abstract
There is considerable likelihood that Gottlob Frege began writing his Foundations of Arithmetic with the expectation that he could introduce his numbers, not with sets, but through some algebraic techniques borrowed from earlier writers of the Gottingen school. These rewriting techniques, had they worked, would have required strong philosophical justification provided by Frege's celebrated "context principle," which otherwise serves little evident purpose in the published Foundations.