Frege’s Ambiguous Legacy (guest post)
“We ought to ask ourselves, how did Frege’s claim to expertise in the matter of thinking fare, at that crucial moment when Germany most needed its intellectuals to rise to the defense of the endangered democratic ideals of civic equality, popular sovereignty and international solidarity? Like Heidegger, Schmitt and many others, Frege failed this test, welcoming fascism and the spread of eliminationist antisemitism with unreserved enthusiasm…”
In the following guest post, Stephen D’Arcy, associate professor of philosophy at Huron University, discusses the political views of Gottlob Frege, their connection to his philosophical ideas, and the role they should play in our assessment of the influential philosopher.
This post is part of a series of guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
–
Frege’s Ambiguous Legacy
by Stephen D’Arcy
As we approach the centenary of his death, we can expect attempts to be made in the coming months to offer wide-ranging overviews of Gottlob Frege’s achievements as a philosopher. And why not? Frege was one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy, the most important logician of modern times, and arguably the main impetus behind the “linguistic turn” in 20th-century thought.
In view of these accomplishments, many assessments of Frege’s legacy will likely take the form of “tributes,” depicting him in an idealized way, as a kind of exemplar of intellectual virtue, to be admired and even emulated. No doubt a few admirers will invoke Bertrand Russell’s hagiographical remark about how Frege reacted to Russell’s discovery of an inconsistency in the logical system that Frege hoped would provide a foundation for arithmetic:
As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realize that there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege’s dedication to truth. His entire life’s work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he responded with intellectual pleasure clearly submerging any feelings of disappointment. It was almost superhuman and a telling indication of that of which men are capable if their dedication is to creative work and knowledge instead of cruder efforts to dominate and be known.
It is, I suppose, perfectly fair to take this anecdote into account when assessing Frege’s activity as an intellectual, even if it does rather exaggerate Frege’s serenity in the face of logicism’s collapse. But when we assess the legacy and the overall character of an important and influential thinker, we ought to resist the impulse to substitute adulation for sober assessment.
Frege was a complicated figure, and our engagement with his work ought to be correspondingly complicated. And that means, in part, admitting that his writings and intellectual activity addressed not only mathematical logic and philosophical semantics, but also (in his last years) legal and political philosophy, and even political theology. This side of Frege’s work—his late political thought, which engages eagerly with Germany’s mid-1920s fascist movement—has been politely but in fact irresponsibly ignored for too long by philosophers. The problem is especially acute among analytic philosophers, who have yet to go through the “reckoning” process in relation to Frege that ‘Continental’ philosophers have gone through in relation to the revelations (or belatedly jogged memory) of Martin Heidegger’s affiliation with German fascism in 1933-45.
That Frege is so rarely acknowledged as a political thinker is due in large part to an accident of history. Those charged with the responsibility to preserve and publish Frege’s political writings simply chose not to do so. Indeed, a series of editors of Frege’s posthumous writings (his Nachlass or scholarly estate), starting with his own son Alfred, chose not to treat his political writings as worthy of scholarly attention. But Frege himself took the opposite view, imploring his son to ensure that (alongside various texts on language, mathematics and logic) several of his political works would be preserved, in the hope that these texts might be judged more favourably by posterity than by his contemporaries. “Do not despise the pieces I have written,” Frege wrote, entrusting his Nachlass to his son Alfred (Letter, 12 January 1925). “Even if all is not gold, there is gold in them. I believe there are things which will one day be prized much more highly than they are now. Take care that nothing gets lost.”
The numerous political writings that Frege deliberately included in his Nachlass ranged over a wide array of topics, including reform of the electoral system, considerations on public finance, the moral grounds for granting or denying civil rights, the nationalist critique of socialism, the basis of law in “justice” as a constraint on legal validity, and many other matters. But due to the disinterest of his Nachlass executors, several of the political writings were lost, presumably permanently.
Even so, the still-extant political writings of Gottlob Frege, most notably the Tagebuch (a philosophical notebook translated as “Diary”) of 1924 and the Vorschläge für ein Wahlgesetz (Proposals for an Election Law) of 1918, are substantial enough to form the basis for an in-depth study of Frege’s political thought. (My book on exactly this subject, Frege and Fascism, is forthcoming later this year from Routledge.) Frege’s extant political writings are not voluminous, admittedly. But they are certainly more extensive than his writings on the unfortunately-named “third realm [Reich],” a topic of numerous articles and books in the secondary literature on Frege.
What we find when we take the unusual decision to study Frege’s political thought does not inspire admiration or an uncritical celebration of his activity as an intellectual. We find, instead, that Frege was an eliminationist antisemite, who wanted to purge all Jews from Germany, denying them all civil rights in the meantime. He idealized anti-socialist terror, and called socialists (the largest political current in Germany at the time) a “cancer” and an “infection” that should be “cured with fire,” just as Adolphe Thiers had done in France (with mass summary executions and deportations) after defeating the Paris Commune. His messianic hopes for a great “statesman” to come, who would “sweep away the people” and “enjoy universal confidence,” led Frege to imagine writing a work on the life of Jesus that would “create a new religion,” in the form of a revival of eschatological Christianity reinterpreted along nationalist and anti-socialist lines.
Some of the concerns Frege addresses in his political writings are practical-political. He repeatedly takes positions (in his posthumously published Tagebuch of 1924) on tactical debates within the fascist movement. For example, he expresses repeatedly his opposition to the ‘German Day’ mobilization underway in the spring of 1924 for a mass rally by the fascists in the city of Halle.
But Frege also expresses in his political writings arguments of a specifically philosophical character (see Frege and Fascism). He claims, for instance, that ethno-racial partiality in public policy (that is, preferential treatment for those he calls “citizens of Aryan descent”) can be justified by appeal to general features of the logic of sequences, including genealogical sequences (“Stammbäume,” as he had earlier called “branched” descent lineages in his 1879 Begriffsschrift). And he gives careful consideration—implicitly responding to claims in Hermann Lotze’s three-volume Logic—to the question of how the use within legislation of vague predicates (that is, concepts without sharply bounded extensions) might adversely affect the application and interpretation of antisemitic laws, jeopardizing the “feasibility” of the kinds of persecutory antisemitic legislation favoured by him and his comrades in the fascist German-völkisch Freedom Party. Frege also tries in his Tagebuch to think through the implications of his view of fictional narration in contrast to sincere veridictive discourse (a matter taken up in his late article, “Der Gedanke”) for the project of developing a politically impactful account of the life of Jesus.
In short, in his extant political writings Frege engages with fascism and nationalist thought generally both as a citizen of the German Republic (whose constitution he wants to see destroyed) and as a logician and philosopher of language, who apparently holds that his views on vague predicates, the transitive closure of binary relations (“the ancestral,” as Russell and Whitehead had put it in their Principia), and the implications of pseudo-assertoric force in fictional discourse, bear importantly on policy debates internal to the fascist Far Right in Weimar-era Germany.
These features of Frege’s activity as a thinker, in his last years, may seem not to matter very much. Although he wrote that he wanted to be influential, and made efforts to impact public opinion and public policy on numerous occasions, even to the point of circulating draft legislation to a number of leading politicians of his day, in the end Frege’s political impact was essentially nonexistent.
Should we then care at all about Frege’s political thought? After all, it is an area of his intellectual activity so devoid of enduring influence that even many Frege scholars today need convincing that there is any such thing as “Frege’s political thought.”
Well, it is a fact about today’s philosophical culture that we do care about the fascist affiliations of German philosophers in the Weimar era, even when their influence on the course of events in those years was meagre or nonexistent. Consider how interested philosophers have been in the politics of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger. The “Heidegger Controversy” alone has generated dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and garnered the attention of publications like the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Le Monde.
Some may doubt the intellectual seriousness of this appetite. Could our interest in the political choices of these long-dead academics be dismissed as mere nosiness, or narrowly biographical curiosity about the lives of intellectual celebrities? No, I do not think so. We care about these matters because we deem the crisis that gripped German society in the Weimar era as posing a kind of test: a moral test, sure, but even more so an intellectual test. Did Heidegger’s “existential analysis” of practice-embedded human agency (“Dasein”) help him to see through the most dangerous and immoral political appeals of modern times, viz. fascist terror? Or was he drawn into the abyss, in spite of his claim to insight about human freedom? And how did Carl Schmitt’s claim to understand law and politics better than liberals and democrats fare in the face of a world-historical crisis in which legality and political decision-making were thrust into the forefront of human affairs, with the highest possible stakes? Were his claims to insight and expertise vindicated or were they exposed by his choices in that most crucial period of German and European history?
In the same vein, we ought to ask ourselves, how did Frege’s claim to expertise in the matter of thinking fare, at that crucial moment when Germany most needed its intellectuals to rise to the defense of the endangered democratic ideals of civic equality, popular sovereignty and international solidarity?
Like Heidegger, Schmitt and many others, Frege failed this test, welcoming fascism and the spread of eliminationist antisemitism with unreserved enthusiasm, at the worst possible time, just when most Germans were uniting to suppress the fascist threat and hoping to establish a viable democratic legal order that could withstand the constant coups and lawless terror of the ultra-nationalist Far Right.
Germans in general, and Frege specifically as a citizen of the fledgling German republic, were confronted with a cluster of stark choices in the spring of 1924, when fascist leaders like Hitler and Ludendorff were on trial for treason, still dangerous but utterly susceptible to a final and irreversible defeat. It was a choice between a narrowly racist nationalism and an expansive and humanistic internationalism; between authoritarian dictatorship and the self-governance of democratic publics; and between racist demonization of Jews and dissidents and a radical embrace of egalitarian solidarity and civic inclusion. Like too many others, Frege chose wrongly in the Weimar years, aligning himself with fascist terror, expressing the hope that his fellow citizens would “join the [German-völkisch Freedom Party] in droves and learn to feel as Germans who have a German fatherland”—and this at a time when that party had just co-organized with Hitler’s Nazis a violent coup to overthrow German democracy, and had followed up the coup attempt by establishing a formal electoral alliance with Hitler’s Nazis.
Frege’s choice was by no means automatic. He was not swept up in a wave of popular enthusiasm for the fascist Far Right, somehow unable to extricate himself from a powerful social consensus. On the contrary, when Frege chose fascism, he broke sharply with the mainstream of mid-1920s German politics, rejecting the egalitarian republicanism of the German mainstream in favour of a fringe extremist position that was—at that time unsuccessfully—clamouring for public acceptance and social legitimacy. (The fascists got about 6.5% of the vote in the election that took place while Frege was writing the Tagebuch, placing their slate in 6th place.) Frege wanted to support that project, to help legitimize fascism and political antisemitism, against what he saw as the disastrous turn of Germany toward democracy and equality since the end of the First World War. He wanted to stop women, Jews and socialists from voting in elections. He wanted to defend the rationality and legality of an “Aryan” (arischer) nationalism, against the internationalism and egalitarianism that he saw as unwelcome “gifts from France.”
Why did Frege make that choice? Why did his commitment to logical consistency, scientific objectivity, and reason-guided inquiry fail to insulate him from such a disastrous political trajectory? It is an important question. But before we can begin to answer it, we have to look honestly and unflinchingly at the plain fact that this did actually happen, that Frege chose fascism, and—far from doing so impulsively or in a fit of intense emotion—he gave considerable thought to his reasons, and wrote about them in some detail. “I am also concerned with matters that fall into the area of politics and political economy,” he told his friend, the philosopher and mathematician (and later, Nazi Party member) Hugo Dingler. “Here I have of course stepped onto ground outside the field of my usual endeavours” (Letter, 17 November 1918).
This step into political thought proved disastrous for Frege. It can hardly be denied that it tarnishes his legacy. But to what extent? And what exactly should we think about it? How, if at all, should it impact the way we teach students about his place in the history of our discipline? These are questions that we have hardly begun to pose, much less thoughtfully to address. The upcoming centenary of his death presents us with an opportunity to start taking this line of questioning seriously, at last.
“Frege was a complicated figure, and our engagement with his work ought to be correspondingly complicated.”
Why? Isn’t more productive to just focus on his best and most interesting ideas? We are in the business of evaluating ideas, not persons.
If we’re interested in the history of ideas, it can only help to understand the life of the person and their motivations for their ideas. Surely it wouldn’t hurt? We can separate the ideas from the person, but a closer look at both the person and the ideas can complicate matters.
If this is a question of how to present the ideas in a classroom, of course we don’t want to get bogged down in complicated matters besides a passing note of them, but if we’re taking a scholarly perspective then it would be unwise to ignore it.
> If we’re interested in the history of ideas, it can only help to understand the life of the person and their motivations for their ideas. Surely it wouldn’t hurt?
It certainly won’t hurt to try, but it also might fail to yield fruit. I personally don’t find anything in Frege’s political writings that gives me any sort understanding of the motivations for Frege’s mathematical-logical-linguistic ideas, and I don’t find anything in the above post to make me reassess that. But if there’s something I’ve missed, please point it out.
We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes, and when the thinker is as great as Frege and the failures are as catastrophic as his embrace of Nazi ideology and the project of eliminating the Jews, we aren’t morally or intellectually at liberty to look away. See also Hume’s support for chattel slavery.
We are indeed morally and intellectually at liberty to look away in both cases. However, Hume never supported chattel slavery.
I don’t think there is any question of looking for implicit ant-Semitism in the Begriffsschrift or of cancelling Frege from the history of analytic philosophy on account of his politics. But there can be interesting questions to ask and lessons to learn from intellectual history about how philosophical achievement can co-exist with profound moral failure. Sometimes it will be unrelated, and so there may not be much to say, but other times there could be subtle connections. We’re in the business of evaluating philosophical ideas, sure, but that’s no reason not to think, sometimes, about the way people have lived as philosophers and of analogous failings that we may be subject to.
I was raised philosophically on a study diet of Frege and yet I had no clue he wrote any political philosophy at all, let alone flirted with fascism. Thanks for the post.
‘study’ works I guess, but I meant to type ‘steady’.
For what it’s worth, it is dubious whether the Diary contains political philosophy that is more substantive or systematic than the roughly reasoned political opinions that most well educated and politically aware citizens have.
Certainly, Frege was a fascist and anti-semite. Certainly, it is worth studying how this relates to his philosophy. But treating these thoughts as a political philosophy in our modern professionalized sense (where not everybody who has reasoned political opinions is a political philosopher) is a stretch.
I’d think it more accurate to say that Frege was a person with political opinions, that he wrote some of them down, and that some choices made in his non-political philosophy might have been influenced by these opinions.
Julian,
I think it’s fair to say that he wasn’t a “political philosopher,” but we go too far if we doubt that he practiced political philosophy (at all). Thematically, he absolutely discusses all the things we expect a political philosopher to discuss. Methodologically, he does so in a way that typifies his distinctive understanding of philosophy, which he sees as the use of careful attention to the proper understanding of concepts that, in uncritical vernacular language, tend to be misleading and foster confusion or error. In the case of denying women the vote, for example, he doesn’t just express an opinion; he gives a philosophical argument for why allowing women to vote reflects an unsophisticated use of words like “justice” and “equal.”
Consider the argument he gives (in the ‘Vorschäge für ein Wahlgesetz,’ 1918): According to Frege, because in the German political tradition the marriage bond, “not the individual,” is the “basis of civic association,” and “we cannot accept that the marriage covenant will be torn by political debates,” but must “face the outside world and represent itself in a unified way,” it follows that the only real question is whether it should be husband or wife that speaks for the family. And this, he suggests, is already fixed by the family’s conventional role differentiation by gender, which determines (he claims) that “the masculine” (das Männliche) and “the feminine” (das Weibliche) are reciprocally supplementing or complementary. By convention, “only the man can have…this position of representative” of the family, at least in the political process, he claims. According to Frege, this claim, that role differentiation in the family assigns different tasks to men and women, and that these different roles are the basis for different rights, “does not prevent us from proclaiming the full human dignity of women.” Indeed, he argues, equal rights for women would offer “only an apparent, not a real justice,” because in a regime of equal rights between men and women “deeply rooted differences will be flouted [missachtet].”
His argument is unconvincing, of course. But is it an attempt to practice political philosophy? In my view, it is. He thinks he is debunking a confusion into which we are led by an uncritical relationship to vernacular political terms like “equal” and “just,” and that by being more careful about how we use those words, we can avoid certain kinds of (alleged) confusion and error. For Frege, that’s the vocation of the philosopher. We can see him very concisely attempt the same thing with respect to the vernacular expression “the will of the people” in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.”
Hey Stephen,
I don’t think we disagree on much of the substance here. What you write below about how an insistence on logic, rationality, truth will not inoculate one against fascism rings very true. And none of these entirely astute observations rest on whether we’d want to call Frege a political philosopher, or just someone who engaged in political philosophy, or neither of these.
Frege was a great logician, one who displayed high rationality, intellectual open-mindedness, and epistemic humility in his work. And he was a fascist. We must face that. You’re absolutely right on all of this. I’m not engaging in apologia here.
But: You could probably right now go up to any philosopher in North America, strike up a political conversation, and you’d get reasoning of roughly the same general depth as you’d find in the Diary (and, usually, similarly fallacious). Perhaps this means we are all engaged in political philosophy all the time.
Regardless, it’s somewhat misleading for someone to take away here that Frege was engaged in “political philosophy”, if they think this means anything further than this kind of reasoning that nigh-all philosophers engage in all the time. Some even write it down (on Twitter, usually).
Arguably, everybody uses the intellectual tools they have to reason through matters of everyday concern. Not just philosophers, all intellectuals. Consider how biologists try to make political arguments using their tools (not so long ago they came to rather similar conclusions about the genders as in the argument you cited).
edited: I wrote a longer response that got eaten by one of the spam filters here; then I wrote this; then my original response showed up. I preserve here the one point I made in the shorter reply that is not also in the longer reply:
Whether or not we call these contents of the Diary “political philosophy” of course changes nothing about their abject moral status. I do think there’s a difference to Heidegger however. If I were to assign a Heidegger reading, I’d be assigning a fascist or fascist-adjacent philosophy. If I assign a Frege reading, I merely assign a philosophy that failed to ward against fascism. Or so I think, roughly in line with Dummett. But I could be convinced otherwise.
more than flirted.
I’m surprised the author did not mention Dummett’s striking words at the end of the Preface to the first edition of *Frege: Philosophy of Language*. They seem entirely apposite here:
Incidentally, I thought the Nachlass was lost during the bombings of WW2? If so, it doesn’t seem very fair to suggest that it was the editors’ disinterest that caused the loss of Frege’s political writings; they couldn’t have predicted a bomb would destroy everything.
Finally, it’s interesting that one of Frege’s most important students was Carnap, who was of the opposite political persuasion, even if he learned a lot from Frege’s logic…
Like Daniel, I thought the Dummett stuff was more widely known … I studied Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic in the 1990s at Western, with Bill Demopoulos. I vaguely recall Bill mentioning it.
Prior to the bombing that destroyed parts of the Nachlass, the political items were already removed, by Alfred and apparently with the agreement of Scholz. For instance, the Vorschläge für ein Wahlgesetz (among other political texts) was removed by Alfred. After the bombing, the Tagebuch was withheld. In such cases, the Nachlass editors, from Alfred on, have always justified these excisions based on a (question-begging) claim that they were not “scientific” (in the broad sense of “scholarly”). My view is that Frege deemed them to be of scholarly interest (even if, as is the case, they are morally and politically awful), and that is why he included them in the Nachlass and urged Alfred to ensure that nothing was lost. More could be said about this, but that’s the main point.
Re: Dummett, I agree that the facts set out by Dummett have been fairly well-known for half a century. However, my complaints about his view are: (1) he treats F’s views as opinions, but seems not to regard them as expressions of Frege’s research interest in “politics and political economy” in his late period; (2) he stops short of acknowledging that Frege was specifically a *fascist* with a keen interest in the fascist movement of his time, engaging w/ Hitler, etc.; and (3) it is not clear from Dummett, nor fom the *reception* by others of Dummett’s observations, that Frege was not indulging in emotional outbursts or exhibiting (mere) attitudes, but was actually developing detailed opinions about constitutional law, public policy proposals, draft legislation, and trying to address issues about vague predicates, etc., in antisemitic law.
So, for me, Dummett and those who echo him are still in a position like Continental philosophers prior to the Heidegger Controversy that broke out in the 1990s. They are downplaying, minimizing, and deflecting, rather than really digging into the questions posed. I think you see symptoms of this in the way philosophers like Jason Stanley discuss fascism: they act as if it is simply irrationalism, and if we are pro-logic and pro-science, of course it won’t take hold. Frege is an important counter-example, that casts doubt on that view. Simply doubling down on the core values of analytic philosophy (reason-guided inquiry, consistency, universal truth) will not defeat fascism. Frege was determined to deploy those resources on fascism’s behalf. There’s something to think about and work through, here, and what I’m mainly against is the casual complacency, which I recognize from pre-1990s Heidegger scholarship.
The general issue of why smart people believe false/bad stuff is a good one. Especially on topics they spend a lot of time on. See Kant, Newton etc. It is clear that reason, as actually exercised, offers less protection than one may hope, and that the first year-logic class is not the weapon it is sometimes claimed to be.
But saying Dummett minimizes Fregean sin is a stretch. And as to the idea that there is something to “deal” with concerning Frege specifically? Sometimes people who are right about some things, are wrong about other things. Countless extreme examples. *Shrug*.
Came here to also say that I found the lack of mention of Dummett surprising. I thought most people interested in Frege would know that book, and hence have seen the preface.
The Nachlass was lost in the war in the sense that the original manuscripts were destroyed and what was left were type scripts that had been made of some of it and were stored elsewhere. But obviously some of the political writings were not lost, only suppressed (otherwise how did Dummett see the journals/diaries after the war?). The original post contains direct links to these preserved political writings!
Thanks for this post! Interesting stuff. I have some critical comments, though.
“In the same vein, we ought to ask ourselves, how did Frege’s claim to expertise in the matter of thinking fare . . . .”
Frege certainly suggested in his 1879 monograph that his concept-script might be used for any discipline that prizes the clear expression of that content which would support deductive inference and thus prizes deductive rigor. But it’s not obvious that he or anyone else applied his concept-script for any but logical-mathematical purposes — that is, for mathematics and the foundations of mathematics.
Of course, perusing the reams and reams of sense-and-reference literature, for example, you’d likely never know that Frege’s ideas were formed in and for a logical-mathematical context. Frege’s non-mathematical, natural-language examples were meant to illuminate the basic idea, not to be themselves the paradigms for an entire literature that threatens to extend Frege’s ideas beyond their intended remit.
That is, just because a philosophical literature implicitly or explicitly assumes that Frege’s ideas are meant for extra-mathematical contexts, that does not answer the question of whether Frege meant them to be. And, again, even if he did, he was clear that it was only insofar as those extra-mathematical contexts concerned themselves with deductive inference. But is moral and political thinking characterized by deductive rigor? Did Frege think so?
All of this is to say: it’s just not obvious that Frege claimed expertise in the matter of thinking tout court. (Which is not to deny he unleashed some pretty snarky and condescending criticism at times.) For every bit of textual evidence one might produce in favor of the proposition that Frege claimed such expertise, there is a bit — two or three, more likely — that one can produce against such a proposition.
If Frege never claimed to be an expert on thinking tout court, then his moral and political failings become explicable — not justifiable! — in a mundane way. And the implicit “gotcha” of the line I quoted above — How insightful can a logician be, really, if he has stupid or pernicious political ideas? — becomes answerable. For it then rests on the assumption that expertise in one area implies expertise in some other area. In the case of Frege, it rests on the assumption that expertise in logical or mathematical thinking implies expertise in moral and political thinking (if there even is such a thing as expertise there). That assumption is far from obviously true.
It seems to me much more common than not that people who are really smart in some way can be really dumb in other ways, or who are laudably committed to important abstract principles (such as justice) can be real dicks to their families, neighbors, or friends, and vice versa.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but just in case: None of this is to apologize for Frege’s moral and political ideas. And none of this is to deny the importance of your inquiry.
> In the case of Frege, it rests on the assumption that expertise in logical or mathematical thinking implies expertise in moral and political thinking (if there even is such a thing as expertise there). That assumption is far from obviously true.
To drive the point further: Frege is perhaps most famous for making a critical mistake *in his own area of expertise*. An expert *logician* of all people published an inconsistent system and (arguably) witnessed his life’s work crumble and end in failure. And yet I’ve never seen anybody use this as a kind of “intellectual test” of his work or his “expertise as a thinker.”
In my opinion, the “intellectual test” is the weakest part of D’Arcy’s post, but D’Arcy frames it as the “intellectually serious” alternative to “mere nosiness, or narrowly biographical curiosity about the lives of intellectual celebrities.” I think this is a mistake. Rather than denigrating “narrowly biographical curiosity”, I recommend that D’Arcy embrace it. Cheryl Misak’s recent biography of Frank Ramsey was well-received, as far as I know. Likewise, a more complete biographical picture of Frege as a person is valuable in its own right.
I learned from this post, so thank you. But, as with some others here, I’m not moved very far by what you say that we can’t just insulate Frege’s earlier foundational work on logic and philosophy of language from his later horrific political and social views.
You write: “In short, in his extant political writings Frege engages with fascism and nationalist thought… as a logician and philosopher of language, who apparently holds that his views on vague predicates… and the implications of pseudo-assertoric force in fictional discourse, bear importantly on policy debates internal to the fascist Far Right in Weimar-era Germany.”
It isn’t all that surprising to hear that Frege’s views on logic etc. bear importantly on policy debates. If I’m a mathematician, and I see political figures making what I take to be mathematical errors, then it would not be unreasonable to try to correct them. Maybe I have odious political views, and I use mathematical reasoning in the course of making arguments for odious conclusions, but the problem there is not in the mathematics but in the other premises in the reasoning. And if I have views about vague language, then I’m naturally going to apply them to legal language – as is done in the very large recent literature on that topic.
So while I find it not particularly philosophically important (even if historically interesting) that Frege himself brought his logical views to bear in fascist Far Right debates, I didn’t see evidence in what you say for the converse: that Frege thought that we could bring his fascist political views to bear on his logic. And that direction is what a lot of us are most interested to hear more about.
An interesting piece, and there is to my mind clear scholarly merit in studying Frege’s contribution to the sad political trajectory of Germany at that time. But to be honest it seems to me that the position of the tradition, to engage with Frege’s logic and work on mathematics and language, and ignore his political writings, is about right. (Referring to it in the introduction to publications of or on his more valuable work is appropriate, to address Dummett’s point.)
More generally, I don’t see why we should think that expertise in logic etc. should immunise a person against fascism, in a society in which it is a living and growing political force.
Heidegger did not “welcome fascism.” He had no nazi sympathies. He wasn’t a fellow traveler. He wasn’t antisemitic.
But he was a master analyst of idle chatter and what “They” say.
See, for starters, “a note about Heidegger and the university.” That links into a highly detailed examination of issues of the careerist controversy.
> Heidegger did not “welcome fascism.” He had no nazis sympathies.
How strange then that this is what he had to say about the sham 1933 elections.
“The German people has been summoned by the Fuhrer to vote; the Fuhrer, however, is asking nothing from the people; rather, he is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether it – the entire people – wants its own existence (Dasein), or whether it does not want it. … There is only one will to the full existence (Dasein) of the State. The Fuhrer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single resolve.” (Speech at Freiburg, translation from The Heidegger Controversy)
I had known something of this from Dummett’s observation on the topic, but this further information is interesting and I look forward to the book. I have always thought there was one important difference between Heidegger’s Nazism and Frege’s fascism/antisemitism, however. Heidegger’s philosophical work exhibits significant substantive affinities with National Socialist ideology/mythology. In other words, it is not an accident that the man who wrote Sein und Zeit was also a Nazi. This is despite the influence of that work on various thinkers who were themselves Jewish and/or resistance fighters and who may be seen to diverge from Heidegger on some philosophical points relevant to the affinity with Nazism. Frege’s most important work in logic and philosophy of mathematics, as far as I can tell, does not show affinities with his abhorrent fascist and antisemitic views. The point that intellectual brilliance or logical reasoning ability does not prevent one from holding abhorrent views should be clear not just from the intellectual history, but from the countless politicians of the current day who graduated from elite institutions.
Having previously reported that Frege had latterly been “a strong nationalist … who believed that Bismarck’s one mistake was the introduction of parliamentarianism, and worst, of all, an anti-Semite,” Dummett wrote again to Russell in 1954. recording that Frege had been “a supporter of … the Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei, which I gather was a precursor of the Nazi party” and had thought that “Jews ought to be expelled from Germany, or at least deprived of political rights.” Dummett said he found it “very disheartening that a man for whom I have always felt such admiration and respect could at any time have held such opinions”
Russell wrote back that he was “pained by his political opinions but still more by his wishing to base mathematics upon geometry.”
In entries in the Tagebuch from spring of 1924, Frege advocates for, among other things, laws requiring Jews to wear identifying symbols or insignia (this according to Rockmore). Why should we not see a direct link between (1) the idea of a supposedly hidden and harmful social element whose elimination will be facilitated by a process of symbolic explicitization, on the one hand, and (2) the project of the Begriffschrift, on the other? Of course, we can enjoy the benefits of Frege’s logic without becoming eliminationist antisemites, just as we can learn from Heidegger’s project without becoming Nazis. But that we can do such things does not conjure the links away, and should not convince us that there is no danger in, for instance, insisting that everything be made explicit and reduced to the calculable.
‘Why should we not see a direct link between (1) the idea of a supposedly hidden and harmful social element whose elimination will be facilitated by a process of symbolic explicitization, on the one hand, and (2) the project of the Begriffschrift, on the other?’
Perhaps because there is no such link.
I don’t pretend to have any special knowledge of his ideas, but it seems to me that this comment is based on a toy version of Frege.
Frege’s notation, the Begriffsschrift, was meant to express all and only that content (of thought) that supports deductive inference. In his monograph, he calls this conceptual content.
Therefore:
First, I doubt there’s any good analogy between an insignia that merely indicates one’s status and a Begriffsschrift sentence that articulates what the conceptual content of a thought is. The insignia makes nothing explicit, though it perhaps symbolizes something that could be made explicit otherwise.
Second, seeing as how his Begriffsschrift was meant for expressing content, it’s not reducible to a calculus, as Frege explained several times, across several papers. He opposed Boole’s logical system because it was made only for algorithmic, “mindless” problem-solving, whereas his, Frege’s, system was made for grasping thoughts and drawing deductive inferences as well as calculating truths.
Frege and Fascism seems like it is going to be an important book (and not just because it brings together two of my main research interests). As I am seeing it, in D’Arcy’s view, this is far from simply a book about Frege’s political philosophy. It is rather an investigation into perhaps the starkest way to pose the question of ideology: how could so many great thinkers fall so intensely and explicitly (and loudly) for something that was such manifest genocidal nonsense? An ideology that was deeply unlikely to produce material benefits even to the supposed Aryan overlords, and would have pretty clear tragic consequences, for everyone (Germany had just, after all, emerged from a world war). To be fair to Dummett, this is how he saw it too, as a profound puzzle. Frege wielded the tools of analytic philosophy and practiced its methodology as well as anyone ever has – as much as anyone, he invented them. As D’Arcy points out, it’s past time for those of us who are analytic philosophers to face the reality that our tools and methodology are no help at all in cutting through even the most clearly insidious ideological morasses. I can’t wait to read it.
Is “no help at all” overstatement? Analogy: some recovering addicts in support groups relapse and take the addictive substance, but support groups offer important help.
I agree. (Despite the overstatement.) I also agree D’Arcy’s book will likely be quite interesting. But books on Frege’s or Heidegger’s moral lapses aren’t the way to make analytic philosophers face reality.
Nor should it be all that surprising nowadays that elites can get swept up in morally and politically dubious ideology.
So Frege was a great philosopher of logic and language but a bad (because fascistic) man, and even a bad (because fascistic) political philosopher. Does this make a difference to how we should evaluate his technical philosophy, meaning by this his philosophy of logic language and mathematics? The answer, I suggest, is no, for the one that has nothing much to do with the other. Frege’s views on logic and mathematics do not entail his fascistic opinions nor do his fascistic opinions entail his views on logic and mathematics, except in the sense that he makes use of one or two ideas derived from his technical philosophy in his fascistic writings. You can be an ardent Fregean in logic but an equally ardent foe to Frege the fascist. It is not just that there is no inconsistency in being a Fregean in logic and an anti-Fregean in politics. There isn’t the slightest degree of conceptual strain. It isn’t as if there is a weaker relation between Frege’s views on logic and his views on politics so that subscribing to the one tips or predisposes you towards the other. Michael Dummett devoted a large part of his life to Frege’s technical philosophy but was conspicuous for his anti-racist politics.
This is not to say that Professor D’Arcy’s project is a complete waste of time. There is, I think a reason for sometimes adverting to the seamier sides of a great philosopher’s life and work even when it does not have much to do with the philosophy that we admire. Some philosophers have seductive literary personalities. In engaging with their ideas you feel yourself to be engaging with a personality, often a personality that it is hard not to like and admire (Indeed it is easy to be seduced into some fondness for the author of the sparkling The Foundations of Arithmetic which in some places is laugh-out-loud funny. ) But there is something wrong with admiring or liking those who are not truly admirable. So that’s one reason sometimes why it is worth making a fuss about a famous a philosopher’s dubious deeds or obnoxious opinions. When we celebrate what Lakatos made of his massive intellectual gifts we do well to remember that because of him there was at least one idealistic young woman who never got to develop the gifts that she may have had because he pressured her into swallowing poison. When we swoon to the hypnotic charm of Wittgenstein’s writings we do well to remember that there was one poor kid who died at fourteen, who Wittgenstein hit so hard that he collapsed, and whose short life was probably made miserable by a terrifying teacher. We should not be making heroes of people who don’t deserve it, something that it is surprisingly easy to do. This is not a reason, I think, for not assigning great but flawed philosophers, good but flawed philosophers, or even OK but flawed philosophers, but it is a reason (sometimes) for saying a little something about the flaws.
It is also worth noting that Frege’s is an exceptional case. His logic and his politics really don’t have much to do with one another. And nobody takes his work seriously as guide to life or regards Frege himself as moral exemplar. (Well, I guess Dummett did before reading his Tagebuch and Russell did before Dummett told him about these writings.) It is otherwise with other philosophers. I think that that Wittgenstein’s defects as a human being are indeed related to his defects as a philosopher. He was an authoritarian bully as an individual (and a Stalinist fellow traveller, to boot) and this authoritarianism is reflected in his philosophy. (For the Stalinist fellow-travelling see Sesardic.)The fundamental project (both early and late) is to devise theories or criteria of meaning which silence potential opponents by reducing them to senselessness. He does not just want to refute the metaphysician – he wants to dehumanise potential opponents as spouters of gibberish. (There is, of course, a long tradition of this sort of thing in philosophy going back at least to Hobbes.) The basic problem with Heidegger, as I understand it, is twofold: a) that his philosophy is supposed to illuminate the human condition giving us at least some guidance as to how to live (we should be both authentic and resolute); and b) that a tendency to Nazism runs right through both his philosophy and his personal life. He was not just a philosopher who happened to be a Nazi, but a thinker whose philosophy had distinctly Nazi ‘push’. Wheeler in his article on the Stanford says that ‘when the contemporary reader of Being and Time encounters the concepts of heritage, fate and destiny, and places them not only in the context of the political climate of mid-to-late 1920s Germany … it is hard not to hear dark undertones of cultural chauvinism and racial prejudice’. It is not that Heidegger’s official philosophy entails Nazism but that it greases a slide in that direction. Wheeler implicitly admits as much when he says that ‘that the temptation to offer extreme social determinist or Nazi reconstructions of Being and Time is far from irresistible’ Which implicitly concedes that there are indeed such ‘temptations’ to be resisted. So although it is possible to be a non-Nazi Heideggerians this is a position that involves more conceptual strain than being a non-fascist Fregean. If you become enamoured of Dasein, you begin down a road that can take you to Nazism. Fans of Frege’s ’Sense and Reference’ run no such risk.
Hume is a more interesting case. Though he was a racist and a philosopher I do not think that he was a racist philosopher. The notorious racist footnote in his essay ‘On National Characters’ is actually at odds with his overall argument, which is that differences in national characters are due to moral rather material causes, that is to nurture (broadly conceived) rather than nature. He is also an explicit critic of chattel slavery as it existed in the ancient world. That he was not opposed to chattel slavery in his own time has only recently come to light, owing to Felix Waldman’s discovery of a letter in which Hume suggests a business opportunity to his friend and patron Lord Hertford, namely that he might like to buy a share in a slave plantation in the ‘Grenadoes’. This suggests that he did not think slavery wrong since he seems to have thought that an investment in a slave plantation was not only profitable but morally permissible. But is this opinion implied by his meta-ethic? If so, that might be a strike against it..
The problem is that Hume’s meta-ethic is janus-faced. Something is good iff suitably qualified observers would approve of it; something is bad iff suitably qualified observers would disapprove; something isn’t bad or is morally permissible if suitably qualified spectators would not disapprove of it; and something ought to be done iff a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of not doing it. The suitable qualifications include being impartially sympathetic and relevantly informed, which involves not suffering from the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion (or the delusive glosses of mercantilism and false economics). So if we assume that some set of observers is suitably qualified, we can read off right and wrong from their reactions. Hume uses this meta-ethic to argue against the Lockean theory that legitimate political power rests on consent. If the Lockeans were correct there would be no obligation to obey governments not based on consent. Hence suitably qualified observers would not disapprove of not obeying such governments. But suitably qualified observers – the class that includes almost everyone not tainted by the delusive glosses of Lockean political superstition – do sometimes disapprove of not obeying governments not based on consent. Hence there are legitimate governments – governments that ought to be obeyed – that are not based on consent. Indeed Hume seems to think that most extant governments are like this. He assumes that at least some of the observers are suitably qualified and hence that their reactions can determine the presence (or the absence) of political obligation. We go from the reactions of a set of observers to the moral facts.
However this procedure depends upon the condition that the observers in question really are suitably qualified. If they are not, their reactions don’t count. The fact that many observers approve of the monkish virtues does not show that they really are virtues. For these observers are not properly informed, suffering as they do from the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion. (It is of course open to Lockean political theorists to pull the same trick. Those who disapprove of disobedience to governments that do not rest on consent are suffering from the delusive glosses of political superstition and are therefore not suitably qualified observers.)
Now let’s consider the deal that Hume suggested to Lord Hertford, namely to buy a share in a slave plantation. Suppose that Hume, Sir George Colebrook, Mr Stewart and Lord Hertford (all of whom were, in one way or another, involved in the deal) were suitably qualified observers, or rather, that they reacted as suitably qualified observers would react. Then (given Hume’s meta-ethic) the fact that they did not disapprove means that the purchase of the plantation along with its slave personnel was morally okay. Suppose however that slavery is not morally okay (which means that investing in the practice is not morally permissible). Then it follows (given Hume’s meta-ethic) that Hume, Sir George Colebrook, Mr Stewart and Lord Hertford were not suitably qualified observers, perhaps because of their sad deficiencies in impartial sympathy. Hume’s meta-ethic by itself does not endorse or prohibit slavery, but can only do either on the assumption that those who approve or disapprove are suitably qualified.
Is that – the indeterminacy – a strike against Hume’s meta-ethics? Perhaps, but this problem has been evident for decades to everyone who construes Hume, as he should be construed, as a Sayre-McCord moral realist. (Moral judgement are the true/false game and some of theme re literally true.) Indeed Hume himself was at least vaguely aware of the difficulty and addresses it (sort of) in ‘Of the Standard Taste’. Thus the discovery of Hume’s personal attitude towards contemporary slavery does not make a significant difference to how we should evaluate his philosophy.
But it does make a difference to how we should evaluate Hume as a human being. Le bon David was not as bon as some of his admirers take him to have been. Once we admit the perspective of those slaves in ‘the Grenadoes’ we cannot agree with his friend Adam Smith that Hume approached “as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”
So there can be good reasons (varying from case to case) for focusing on the dubious deeds and obnoxious opinions of famous philosophers (as also on those of famous scientists, artists and writers). And it is perhaps it is worth saying a little more about Frege’s post-war fascistic scribblings than Dummett said all years ago. But really, a whole book!? I would have thought that they were worth a couple of articles, at most, or perhaps a couple of chapters in a full scale biography. After all, they had absolutely no influence and hardly anybody knew of their existence until Dummett talked about them in the his ‘Preface’. (Hardly a case of ‘deflecting and downplaying’.) Professor D’Arcy says that ‘Frege is an important counter-example’ to the thesis that ‘fascism … is simply irrationalism, and if we are pro-logic and pro-science, of course it won’t take hold’. It is for this reason that he is supposedly worth studying in depth. The problem with this is that Frege is a counterexample to a thesis that only an idiot would believe. Logic and science may help in combatting fascistic (and other pernicious) ideologies. But the idea that they are a panacea is simply silly and piece of silliness moreover that hardly anyone believes.
I’m with Animal Symbolicorum on this , except that he/she does not go far enough. He/she suggests that there is only a puzzle about how a person brilliant in one area can have hideous moral and political opinions “on the assumption that expertise in one area implies expertise in some other area. In the case of Frege, it rests on the assumption that expertise in logical or mathematical thinking implies expertise in moral and political thinking (if there even is such a thing as expertise there). That assumption is far from obviously true.” I would go further – that assumption is obviously false. And we don’t need the example of Frege to prove the point.
I disagree with most of your points (unsurprisingly, as you disagree with most of mine, and we approach these questions from starkly different angles). In particular, I don’t see the relation between the Heidegger and Frege cases the way you do. For me, the main point is that Frege does overtly political philosophy, and takes clear positions on things like constitutional law and public policy, including matters of detailed institutional design, drafting legislation and developing a proposed pension benefits scheme. Heidegger, on the other hand, expresses conservative, nationalist, and sometimes racist (in some specific cases, fascist) themes more indirectly or covertly, for instance, in opaque generalisations about “the Germans” and “the Greeks,” or less frequently (but tellingly) about “world Jewry,” and so on. (Here, I’m not talking about Heidegger’s more overt and explicit commentary about National Socialism, etc.) So, we find in the critics of Heidegger’s politics (myself included) very different understandings of exactly what the political import of key ideas might be. For instance, some think that Being and Time is his most fascist work, whereas others claim that it is his least fascist one, and that later work is actually more fascist. These divergences are symptomatic of the interpretive mediation that is necessary in the Heidegger case, but not nearly as much in the Frege case.
More importantly, though, I think you miss the mark when describing the relation between Frege’s political philosophy and his philosophical logic. It is not a matter of some kind of a priori irrelevance between logic and politics, as you suggest. True, you’re right to be doubtful about (for instance) Carnap’s claim that an interest and proficiency in logic makes one less vulnerable to racism and fascism (Carnap made this claim to Russell, and Russell seemed almost to agree in his “Revolt Against Reason” essay), even if I might be slower than you may be to ascribe “idiocy” to either of them on this basis. Instead, the relation between Frege’s philosophical logic and his political philosophy is a matter of very specific instances of “over-determination,” by which I mean a kind of multi-cause influence, where logic plays a part. Frege’s interest in “Aryan descent” as a factor in constitutional law and public policy is not due to logic in any simple way, obviously. But his choice to think about “Aryan descent” in terms of transitive generalization from the base case of the parent-child relation is clearly influenced in part by his interest in mathematical logic (namely, the theory of sequences or series developed in the Begriffsschrift). This is a very distinctive way (in the völkisch movement) to think of “Aryan descent.” Most people in his milieu thought about it in terms of “blood,” or in some cases in terms of “breeding.” But Frege (in part influenced by Bruno Bauch) took the logic of series as his favoured framework. So, no, it’s not a crude “slippery slope” that we’re discussing here. Rather, it’s a matter of Frege developing an integral conception of things that integrates his findings about logic in.certain very specific ways (not necessarily susceptible to sweeping generalisations, of the kind you offer) helping to shape (along with other factors) some of his proposals and conceptions concerning politics and law. His worries about the vagueness of the word “Jewish” as a barrier to antisemitic legislation is a very “niche” worry, not shared by most of his fellow fascist intellectuals (in quite the same way), but it is clear to me, at least, that his thinking on this is informed by comments about jurisprudence and vagueness made by Hermann Lotze. So, no, it’s not about generalized relations (or non-relations) between logic and politics that are at stake. It’s about very specific ways in which Frege, the logician, engages with policy and law (and theology) in the context of the Weimar social crisis.
You fail to distinguish between two distinct claims:
Claim 1) A scientific and logically informed culture tends to promote humane values (and thus to be non-fascistic). Scientifically and informed and logically literate people are (on the whole) less prone to fascism than the ignorant.
Claim 2) Scientifically and logically informed people are guaranteed to support humane values (and thus to be non-fascistic).
Claim 1) is probably true (see Stephen Pinker’s (The Better Angels of Our Nature), but Frege does not constitute a counterexample since it is a very broad generalisation that admits of many exceptions. Frege does constitute a counterexample to Claim 2) but neither Russell (for sure) nor Carnap (I suspect) subscribed to it. It is obviously false and indeed idiotic and very few people believe it. So if the point of the book is to provide a counterexample to that thesis, it is kind of a waste of time.
But perhaps there is a fall-back position here. Though Frege does not constitute a counterexample to to Claim 1), since it is rough generalisation subject to many exceptions, perhaps he provides what might be called a counter-instance, that is to say, an exception to the rough generalisation that is so striking as to call it it into question? But again the answer is ‘no. People who think that a scientific and logically informed culture tends to promote humane values, think this because it is difficult to combine a commitment to logic and science with fascistic opinions in the context of public debate. But Frege’s fascism was private affair, a matter of the solitary scribblings of an embittered old man, writing towards the end of an apparently unsuccessful career. No chance then of using his commitment to science and logic to leverage him away from his obnoxious opinions in the course of an interpersonal discussion.
You also misrepresent me. I do not ‘suggest’ an ‘a priori irrelevance between logic and politics’. Sometimes such connections exist and sometimes they don’t. (I think, for instance, that there really are links between my own anti-authoritarian attitudes and my fellow-travelling sympathy for paraconsistent logic. I have recently published a paper using Prior’s work on the philosophy of logic – specifically his critique of inferentialism – to diagnose what is wrong with the use of ‘conspiracy theory’ as a pejorative.) What I do suggest, however, is that Frege’s technical philosophy does not entail his fascism except in the trivial sense that bits and bobs of his technical philosophy (which of course entail themselves) may resurface in the idiosyncratic mishmash of his fascistic outlook. If I understand you correctly, rather than rambling on about blood he prefers to define being’ Aryan’ in terms of a transitive ancestral relation. (Though frankly this strikes me as a distinction without much of a difference.) Because he is a big man for concepts with sharp boundaries he has a problem with operationalising the concept of jewishness which (because of mixed marriages) comes in degrees. (If you are an anti-semite it needs to be operationalised if it to be translated into discriminatory public policies). But this tells us next to nothing about fascism and antisemitism as real-world ideologies. In order to understand Frege’s peculiar brand of fascism you need to understand a) the fascistic ideas that influenced him and b) his personal idiosyncracies as an embittered old logician. Thus to understand him you already have to have a well-developed understanding of the inputs to his personal brand of fascism, that is to say the fascistic currents of thought in Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic. But to understand fascistic currents of thought in Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic you don’t have to understand Frege, since his brand of fascism had inputs but no outputs. Thus if you are interested in the development and spread of fascist ideas as an historical phenomenon, a study of Frege is a waste of time. it adds nothing to the knowledge of his inputs which it presupposes. It is only if his brand of fascism is so intellectually powerful that it needs to be disinterred and addressed, that a book about him is worthwhile project from an historical or anti-fascist point of view. And from what you say this isn’t the case.
Sounds as if the trees died in vain.
Cultural pessimism was a salient feature of this very complicated period. It is today as well in the USA. Thinkers like Oswald Spengler, (Decline of the West) spoke to an entire zeitgeist and a great many Germans, even if they couldn’t fully understand him (and even if the positivists considered his work ponderous nonsense). Philosophers who study the thinkers of interwar Germany should read this, as well as the other works of the ‘conservative revolutionaries’ and some of the relevant history and cultural theory as well. Roger Griffin, a recent historian of fascism, has written a number of very erudite and insightful books about this, providing valuable and context and background.
Very interesting. It might be added that one of the inventors of deontic logics, the Austrian philosopher Ernst Malley joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1933, when it was basically underground and expressed Nazi ideas in writing.
Even if the project does not add anything to our understanding of Frege as a philosopher, it may be worthwhile. It provides a case study of an educated German proto-fascist’s political opinions around 1900-1925. Frege’s largely private views on politics are unusually well documented, and it might help that he was extraordinarily skilled in expressing his thoughts precisely. Case studies like this can help us understand a phenomenon, such as the evolution of German far-right ideology.
Very difficult – the taking of sides… as the article/essay suggests. Nor often need it be done. With eye and ear toward union, voice comes along. JMD!
Hi Stephen, great article. Would you be able to share more on what Frege said on “the implications of pseudo-assertoric force in fictional discourse” for politics, or we’ll have to wait for your book to come out? I’m working precisely on this issue and I-d be really curious to learn more. Feel free to drop me an email if appropriate (address on my website, linked).
Hi Neri, I sent you an email and it bounced back to me, not recognizing your email address (ending in “ub.edu”), which I got from the website. But if you write to me at sdarcy AT huron DOT uwo DOT ca, I can send you my reply.
Those reading this now (today’s the 100th anniversary of Frege’s death) may wish to know that the book, ‘Frege and Fascism’ (Routledge, 2025) is now available.
This is great.