Foundations of Arithmetic. A logico-mathematical enquiry into the concept of number. English translation by J. L. Austin.

FREGE Gottlob (1950.)

£400.00 

Available to view at our Curzon Street shop.

First US edition. 8vo. xi [+ xie], 119 [+ 119e] pp., with parallel German and English text. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (spine panel toned with small loss at head, some further light wear to extremities, otherwise a very good copy indeed). New York, Philosophical Library.

The German logician's seminal treatise clearly defining the link between numerical statements and the philosophical concepts they assert, first published as Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung uber den Begri der Zahl in 1884. Frege's influence on Wittgenstein and Russell in particular cannot be overstated, and in his and Whitehead’s preface to the Principia Mathematica (1910) Russell declared that, "in all questions of logical analysis our chief debt is to Frege". This English translation by Austin was far more favourably received in 1950 than the original German text, which was harshly critiqued upon publication. "Frege provides in the Grundlagen a non-technical philosophical justification and outline of the ideas that he was to develop technically in his two-volume work Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1893/1903)" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Stock Code: 247246

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