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Brief Lives

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)

Alistair MacFarlane laments the profound disappointment of a master of logic.

Nothing in our intellectual life seems more secure than arithmetic and logic. When we buy something, hand over cash and receive change, the statement: “This amount of change is correct” must be true or false. This is so despite the country, the currency, the article purchased, the market involved, and a myriad of other factors.

Logic and arithmetic seem to fit together naturally. Imagine then the colossal shock felt by Gottlob Frege, who had spent years attempting to prove that arithmetic could be based on logic, when he received a letter from Bertrand Russell demonstrating that his proof was fallacious.

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