What's Puzzling Gottlob Frege?

Abstract

By any reasonable reckoning, Gottlob Frege's ‘On Sense and Reference’ is one of the more important philosophical papers of all time. Although Frege briefly discusses the sense-reference distinction in an earlier work (‘Function and Concept,’ in 1891), it is through ‘Sense and Reference’ that most philosophers have become familiar with it. And the distinction so thoroughly permeates contemporary philosophy of language and mind that it is almost impossible to imagine these subjects without it.The distinction between the sense and the referent of a name is introduced in the second paragraph of ‘Sense and Reference.’

From The Begriffsschrift To "Über Sinn Und Bedeutung": Frege As Epistemologist And Ontologist

“…(Though Heck's remarks concern Frege's views in USB, he endorses that work's attribution of the name view to the Begriffsschrift; see 100-101.) Thau and Caplan ((2001) 177 n. 28) also drift toward this interpretation. Makin ((2000) 96) has pointed out the absurdity of taking the name view as a thesis about the nature of identity.…”

“…For example, none of the recent discussions of §8 cited above (see n. 14 ) provide a precise account of it. The gap is particularly glaring in Thau and Caplan ((2001) 178 -180) who, as I have indicated (see n. 24), find the argument I have presented to be incomplete. What needs to be added, they argue, is Frege's concept of a "mode of determination."…”

“…14 This second issue has been the subject of much recent scholarly controversy. In their seminal paper Thau and Caplan (2001) contest what they call the "standard interpretation" (see 159 -164) of the opening paragraph of USB, which takes it to reject the name view. Against the standard interpretation they argue that Frege never abandons the name view.…”

Reply to critics of the analytic tradition in philosophy vol. 1 the founding giants

“…Other than Dummett 1973 and writings by either him or Nathan Salmon, Soames only refers in the two chapters on Frege to the following works on Frege…Beaney 1996, Burgess 2005, Currie 1982, Dejnozka 1981, 1996, Kripke 2008, Perry 1977, Thau and Caplan 2000, Yourgrau 1982, 1986o imply that there is little else worth reading is inexcusable.…”

Soames on Frege: provoking thoughts

“…In fact, the reference to any of the literature that has since been written on Frege is astonishingly thin. Other than Dummett (1973) and writings by either him or Nathan Salmon, Soames only refers in the two chapters on Frege to the following works on Frege (in alphabetical order): Beaney (1996), Burgess (2005), Currie (1982), Dejnozka (1981Dejnozka ( , 1996, Kripke (2008), Perry (1977Perry ( , 1979, Thau and Caplan (2000), Yourgrau (1982Yourgrau ( , 1986Yourgrau ( -1987. 6 Of these, Currie's introduction to Frege's philosophy receives by far the most citations (twelve in all), suggesting that for Soames, the literature on Frege pretty much stopped in 1982.…”