Frege on Truth, Beauty and Goodness Essay -- Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob

Frege on Truth, Beauty and Goodness Scholars of Frege have spent a good deal of energy in discussing his views about truth, logic, and the relation between them. To one set of clues, however, scant attention has been paid. Repeatedly throughout his career, Frege attempted to illuminate the relation between logic and truth by comparing it to the relations between ethics and the good and aesthetics and the beautiful. Truth, beauty and goodness, of course, have had a long history in platonic philosophy. By the beginning of Frege’s career, they were also coming to play a prominent role in neo-Kantian thought, particularly that of Wilhelm Windelband. It is plausible to conjecture that Frege was inspired to look at ethics and aesthetics to understand the link between logic and truth by their connection in the work of Windelband or other neo-Kantians, though I know of no direct evidence that he was. But whatever the sources of Frege’s use of the analogy, it is to his own writing that we must look for its meaning . In the following, I shall look at the comparisons in detail in order to see exactly what Frege intended in likening the relation of logic to truth to that of ethics to the good and aesthetics to the beautiful. It will turn out that, although the language of the various comparisons is superficially similar, Frege actually makes four different points by means of the analogy. Furthermore, only one of these comparisons says something that both a) is about logic and truth and b) could not be better said by a comparison of logic to, for example, physics. I draw two general conclusions from this. First, Frege was struggling over how to understand the relation of logic to truth. (Perhaps this is obvious anyway.) If he had not bee... ...c and Thought†. Frege, Gottlob. (1967) The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, trans. M. Furth (Berkeley: University of California Press). ---------- (1977) Logical Investigations, trans. P. Geach and R. Stoothoff (New Haven: Yale University Press). ---------- (1979) Posthumous Writings, trans. P. Long and R. White (Oxford: Blackwell). Gabriel, Gottfried. (1984) â€Å"Fregean Connection: Bedeutung, Value and Truth-Value†, Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 372-6. -------------- (1986) â€Å"Frege als Neukantianer†, Kant-Studien, 77, 84-101. Goldfarb, Warren. (2001) â€Å"Frege’s Conception of Logic†, in Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy, eds. J. Floyd and S. Shieh (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ricketts, Thomas. (1996) â€Å"Logic and Truth in Frege†, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 70, 121-40.