[New Entry by Roy Cook on February 7, 2023.]
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (b. 1848, d. 1925) is often credited with inventing modern quantificational logic in his Begriffsschrift. While there has been some controversy over exactly what was novel with Frege, and what can be found in the work of contemporaries such as George Boole, Augustus DeMorgan, Ernst Schroder, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Venn (see, e.g., Putnam 1982 or Boolos 1994 for accounts that resist the tendency to attribute all of modern logic to Frege, and also the entry on…

Originally appeared on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Read More