Event Timeslots (1)
Thursday
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Frege's 'Foundations of Arithmetic' was the first book exclusively devoted to the philosophy of mathematics. It remains one of, perhaps the, most influential books on the topic. And it is not an overstatement to say that it is still the best. Few books can serve as an introduction as well as a source of inspiration for new research. Frege begins his book by asking what numbers are. Discussing, and mostly rejecting, various views earlier writers had put forward, he finally comes to his own solution, with some help from Hume and Leibniz: numbers are objects and the laws of arithmetic are nothing but laws of logic. This position was later called logicism, a version of which was also espoused by Russell. In this seminar, we will read the entire book from cover to cover, accompanied by Michael Dummett's commentary. Time permitting, we'll look at the more recent developments of Hale's and Wright's neologicism.