Faculty of Philosophy

Russell and Frege on names

Dr M. D. Potter

First half of Michaelmas Term 2008: Thursdays at 9am in LB4

Intended audience

Part IB logic candidates.

Summary

Around 1900 Frege and Russell developed fundamentally opposed semantic theories to account for how ordinary names refer. By investigating their reasons we shall be studying one of the central moments in the birth of analytic philosophy.

Reading

The two central articles which we shall be studying are:

• Gottob Frege, 'On sense and reference', in P. Geach & M. Black (eds), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952); repr. in A. W. Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference (OUP, 1993); and in P.Ludlow (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)
• Bertrand Russell, 'On denoting', Mind, 14 (1905), 479-93; repr. in his Logic and Knowledge: essays 1901-1950, ed. by R.C. Marsh (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956); and in his Collected Papers, vol. 4 (London: Routledge, 1994); and in G. Ostertag (ed.), Definite Descriptions: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); and online here

Handouts

Handouts in PDF to download and print (from Cambridge web addresses only).

• Lecture 1: Russell's theory of descriptions
• Lecture 2: The Gray's Elegy argument
• Lecture 3: On sense and reference
• Lecture 4: Comparison of Russell's and Frege's theories