Frege and Philosophy at Home
When did analytic philosophy begin? Many who ask that question answer: 1879, the year Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift was published. But how did Frege, a math professor whose studies originally focused on geometry, do it? Is it true that “Frege created logic and analytic philosophy out of nothing”?
That’s how Jens Lemanski (University of Münster) puts Michael Dummett‘s influential view, en route to offering an alternative explanation of how Frege came to develop the ideas that make him such an influential figure in the history of philosophy: it was his dad.
Not only that, but, as the title of a recent article by Lemanski in History and Philosophy of Logic puts it, “Frege’s Father Was a German Idealist“.
So is analytic philosophy fundamentally a son’s rebellion against his father? Perhaps Freud, a contemporary of Frege’s, would have said so, but humorous as that would be, that’s not Lemanski’s thesis at all.
Rather, Lemanski argues that “Gottlob Frege’s father Alexander studied with a philosopher from the broad circle of German idealism and tried in several writings to apply and continue his philosophy himself. This new source not only elucidates Gottlob Frege’s familiarity with post-Kantian philosophy, but also has the potential to explain logical influences, such as that of Leibniz.”
Gottlob Frege, around 27 years old (source)
Here’s a brief excerpt:
I believe that the historical material presented here has resolved the long-standing speculation as to how a mathematician like Frege was able to acquire such knowledge of philosophy or why he was interested in philosophy at all. This does not mean, of course, that all or most questions about Gottlob Frege’s philosophical background have now been clarified. However, this historical material elucidates the plausibility of representing theses that were previously deemed implausible, such as the influence of the notations of Leibniz or [Karl Christian Friedrich] Krause on Frege. It is conceivable that Gottlob Frege encountered a notation similar to that of Begriffsschrift for the first time in his father’s lecture notes from Göttingen.
We can also vividly imagine this influence by certain scenarios: It is not implausible that Alexander Frege utilized a notation similar to Krause’s and Leibniz’s to elucidate the rudiments of logic to his son during their shared breakfast table discussions. It is probable that many philosophers and logicians will be familiar with such experiences from their own family lives.
And since Alexander Frege had at least integrated Krause’s ideas into his language teaching and since his wife was also a teacher at the Höhere Töchterschule, we can imagine that there were more intense intellectual debates in the parental home, which Gottlob was influenced by.
As Kreiser rightly points out, Frege’s parents exerted a significant influence on their son’s intellectual and professional development (Kreiser 2001, 176). This assertion is corroborated by the evidence presented in this study. However, it was only when the newly accessible material was examined that the full extent of this influence became apparent. The late work of Alexander Frege, in particular, points to a bibliophile or at least a universally erudite personality. Based on the sheer number of references in Alexander Frege’s late work, there is no reason to assume that his son had no knowledge of philosophy, only limited access to philosophical texts, or that he created his logic and philosophy out of nothing. The evidence presented here indicates that both Alexander and Gottlob shared a wide range of interests, influences and contacts… Consequently, should future research not dogmatically reject the close connection between post-Kantian philosophy and analytic philosophy, these traces, which have only been hinted at here, have to be further explored.
You can read the full article here.
Frege is not the only notable figure in the history of philosophy who had a philosopher as a parent—Leibniz and Mill come to mind—who are some others?
Discussion welcome.
Wilfrid Sellars and Galen Strawson leap to mind (with fathers Roy Wood and Peter, respectively).
James and Stuart Rachels. Robert and Paul Audi. Gil and Liz Harman.
Did Frege consider himself a philosopher or even what he was doing was philosophy? I doubt he was the originator of analytical philosophy and even if there is a single origin.
As the article states, the idea that analytical philosophy begins with Frege is associated with Michael Dummett, but Lemanski’s summary of Dummett’s position is a caricature.
So first let me note that one of Dummett’s books is called Origins of Analytical Philosophy. As he explains in the preface, he made a deliberate choice not to write a book called The Origin of Analytical Philosophy, acknowledging that he was presenting one strand in a complicated story.
In that book he describes Frege not as the father but the grandfather of analytical philosophy – Frege planted seeds, but other sewed the harvest. Scott Soames in The Analytic Tradition In Philosophy Vol 1 names Frege as the first of the “founding giants”, but again his idea is that Frege’s innovations in logic and mathematics planted the seeds, but it was Wittgenstein who realized that this provided the basis for a new and revolutionary way of doing philosophy.
Dummett himself conceded that his first book on Frege, Frege: Philosophy of Language, ignored the philosophical context in which Frege wrote, focussing on a comparison of Frege’s ideas with those of later philosophers. This book could indeed give the impression that Frege’s philosophy appeared as if by magic. But even in this book, nothing Dummett says suggests that he thinks that Frege thought of himself as the first analytical philosopher. From p. 683
“It was to a large extent through Wittgenstein that the Fregean revolution was transmitted; and it is to Wittgenstein that we owe the formulation of the thesis that ‘all philosophy is a critique of language.’ Frege never formulated a programme for philosophy as a whole, nor claimed to be more than a logician and a philosopher of mathematics…”
So I think that your doubts about Frege are well founded, but I also think Lemanski’s quotation may have given you an exaggerated idea of the kind of claims that have been made on behalf of Frege.
That said, I do look forward to reading Lemanski’s article, and I think he really does cast new and interesting light on Frege’s connection with previous philosophers.
it is hard to doubt that what we see in Russell’s Theory of Descriptions is analytic philosophy fully formed; but it comes fifteen years or so before Wittgenstein’s work.
Yes. In fact if we look at the origins of the term “analytical philosophy” it seems to begin when John Wisdom said that Bentham anticipated Russell’s use of the logico-analytic method. A year after that, Collingwood described Moore and Stebbing as analytical philosophers.
Dummett certainly did not try to deny the significance of Russell’s work, and indeed contacted Russell as part of his research into Frege. But Dummett was determined to find a doctrine that all analytical philosophers share, a doctrine that justifies the use of a particular method to solve a wide range of problems. So Dummett’s perspective is that Frege and Russell engaged in a critique of language, and it was fruitful, but Wittgenstein was the first to say out loud “and this is what all philosophy is”, and then that idea spread. I don’t think analytical philosophy was ever a movement focussed on a shared doctrine (in the way that logical positivism was, for example), so Dummett is searching for something that doesn’t exist.
My problem with this article is that several hundred pages of densely argued material by Dummett is reduced to a single sound-bite, which doesn’t come from Dummett himself, and this can then be dismissed as far too simplistic a view of the history.
Did Frege think of himself as doing philosophy? Yes, since he conceived himself to be answering philosophical questions in dialogue with famous philosophers. Check out his Foundations of Arithmetic. Here is the analytical table of contents for Chapter 1:
1. Recent work in mathematics has shown tendency towards rigour of proof and sharp definitions of concepts
2. This critical examination must ultimately extend to the concept of number itself. The aim of proof.
3. Philosophical motives for inquiry: the controversies as to whether the laws of number are analytic or synthetic, a priori or a posteriori. [Obviously Kantian questions.] Sense of these expressions
4 Task of the present work
—————————————
He goes on in subsequent chapters to discuss Kant, Leibniz, Mill, Jevons, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Baumann (a philosopher, author of Die Lehren Von Raum, Zeit Und Mathematik in Der Neuren Philosophie) and Descartes.
In other works he discusses or corresponds with contemporary philosophers and logicians such as Erdmann, Boole, Marty and Stumpf. Whether not he considered himself ‘a philosopher’ (as opposed to a mathematician) he presumably thought of himself as ‘doing philosophy’ when engaging with these people or discussing distinctively philosophical issues such as the nature of logic and the analytic/synthetic distinction. How could he not?
There isn’t (OF COURSE!) just ONE point of origin for Analytic Philosophy (however exactly that is defined) but the idea that Frege isn’t one of the most important is simply ridiculous. Somebody mentioned as an inspiration by such paradigmatically analytic philosophers as Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap is clearly of paramount importance especially as he is one of the co-inventors of of the propositional an predicate calculi.
Finally, I am surprised that nobody thus far has referred to Bobzein’s bombshell research (reported on an earlier thread by Nicholas Denyer) that suggests that Frege derived a lot of his key ideas from the Stoics (also philosophers) via the historian of logic Prantl (algain a philosopher, though not a very good one).
James and John Stuart Mill.
Neville and Maynard Keynes.
Can it really be true that analytic philosophers have utterly forgotten about the contributions of Charles Sanders Peirce?
Peirce was already using the existential quantifier (his sigma notation) in his papers in 1867 and 1870 (see Richard Beatty, “Peirce’s development of quantifiers and of predicate logic”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic; Hillary Putnam, “Peirce the logician”, Historia Mathematica; Quine, “Peirce’s logic”). And this was long before Frege’s Begriffsshrift in 1879. Peirce discovered quantification before Frege. That said, Peirce doesn’t have his universal quantifier (his pi notation) until around 1880.
I’m happy to list both Frege and Peirce as the inventors of the predicate calculus. But it’s pretty shocking if analytic philosophers have simply forgotten about Peirce. After all, as I understand the history, it was Peirce’s notation and theory of quantification that went on to influence Peano and other mathematicians. Frege was mostly unknown. Plus Peirce worked on combining his logic with computing machines.
But there’s an even more shocking absence: Josiah Royce. It was Royce who saw the value in Peirce’s work, Royce who brought Russell to Harvard to study the new logic, and Royce who wrote extensively on the applications of the new logic. Not to mention that Royce made some of the first contributions to the study of recursive functions. And his interests in computation inspired his student Norbert Wiener. Likewise Royce helped the further development of logic via his student Henry Sheffer, and Royce helped initiate the development of modal logic via his student C. I. Lewis.
Whatever the contributions of Frege may have been (and they were certainly significant), I’ll say that Peirce is the founder of analytic philosophy.
CS Peirce also had a philosophy dad: Benjamin Peirce. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-benjamin/
…who had a MAJOR influence on his son…
True. For receipts, see https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAAPD-14.pdf and https://philpapers.org/archive/CHACAT-21.pdf and even this https://youtu.be/7rQuRqbqddM?si=_XfktY9J4uiItTA6
A lot of this is going to depend on what counts as “analytic” philosophy! I think of “analytic” philosophy as being the line that starts with Russell and Moore and develops from their reading of Frege. It has large influences from Vienna Circle positivism and American pragmatism, and a large number of members of those traditions eventually get absorbed into the analytic tradition. But I think Russell and Moore were more influenced by Frege than by Peirce (though Ramsey may have been more influenced by Peirce than by Frege).
Why does Sidgwick not count as doing analytic philosophy? It was in ethics, which of course doesn’t count if you equate philosophy with M&E and phil of language — but why do that? He was arguing in a recognizably analytic way before Russell and Moore and was also a realist, i.e. anti-Idealist, before them. Plus he influenced (though I now can’t remember the details) Russell and Moore as (I think) their teacher, in at least some sense, and a dominant Cambridge figure.
I think in some ways it’s an academic British style which goes back to William of Ockham and his analysis of terms.
Not just in ethics either; Emily Thomas has an interesting paper where she explores the influence ‘Old Sidg’ had on the philosophy of time, esp. through Moore:
‘G E Moore’s Time Realism’.
Pierce is not forgotten, i studied his work very well on my studies. On exam about history of analytic philosophy, as well as on other, not to mention Frege.
May I by any chance prevail upon you to elaborate on the mathematicians other than Peano whom Peirce’s notation and theory of quantification influenced more greatly than the then-mostly-unknown Frege? I would like to learn as much about this as I can, any leads are appreciated. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Peirce
–> Ernst Schroder (Vorlesungen uber die Algebra der Logik)
–> Peano
–> Russell & Whitehead
Thank you for your prompt reply!
Frege’s influence on Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica was quite blatant, not to mention the complaints by figures like Kurt Gödel that the Principia was a step backward from Frege in terms of rigor. So the idea thrown around from time to time that Frege had little influence on the practice of logic is simply wrong.
Furthermore, Pierce’s treatment of quantification lacked the sophistication needed for the later advances in logic, including a rigorous treatment of recursion/computability. Pierce did amazing work but Frege’s contributions shouldn’t be dismissed here.
“Peirce”, not “Pierce”. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve made that typo…
Damaris Cudworth Masham and Ralph Cudworth.
While some influences can be, after effort, elucidated, even by practitioners (THAT ‘original’s’ sources), while not every influence is prepared to appear in consciousness, leads me to agree – treading the often darkened paths back, along history’s track would probably lengthen any list at least as much as now only a quantum storage, or the world’s many document collections, could and do handle. But it is in accuracy’s interest to attempt the excavations, the notices.
So, only appreciation rises for any author’s dedication, however failing the high mark, giving credit to earlier thinkers.
Camo and Frank Jackson. And if I recall correctly, there are three-generation examples in the Mackie and Stout families.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, was a philosophy professor at Bonn and Tübingen.
Immanuel Hermann Fichte, interestingly in the context of Frege and Krause, was the one who thought that Karl Christian Friedrich Krause’s “analytic philosophy” is a “remedy” to Hegel’s philosophy.
Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking had a son, Richard Hocking, who was a philosophy professor at Emory.
According to Alvin Plantinga’s Wikipedia entry, his father Cornelius received a doctorate in philosophy from Duke and “taught several academic subjects at different institutions.”
Sibling philosophers? John Anderson’s brother, William, was a philosophy professor at Auckland University College.
John Anderson’s brother, William, was a philosophy professor at Auckland University College – and apparently a dull reactionary dog. See my ‘Getting the Wrong Anderson’.
Here’s a family with three philosophy professors:
William Ralph Boyce Gibson (1869-1935), held a chair in mental and moral philosophy at the University of Melbourne.
One of his sons, Alexander Boyce (Sandy) Gibson (1900-1972), became a philosophy professor at Melbourne in 1935.
Another son, Quentin Boyce Gibson (1913–2001), taught philosophy at Canberra University College and then the ANU.
Frege was a fascist and anti-Semite who praised Hitler and supported the expulsion of Jews from Germany. He’s not a philosopher anyone should admire.
Michael Dummett read Austin’s translation of Frege’s Grundlagen and found so much to admire that he learned German and mathematics so as to devote himself to the study of Frege’s works, crowning him as the grandfather of analytical philosophy. As he was nearing the completion of his first book on Frege, Dummett was permitted to read Frege’s unpublished papers, and this was when he discovered those now infamous passages in which Frege praises Hitler and expresses hatred of the Jews. Dummett drew the attention of the philosophical world to these writings, which were then published, and expressed his shock at finding such views expressed by someone he had hitherto considered to be an absolutely rational man. Dummett and his wife were both active campaigners against racism and supported the rights of refugees. There can be no doubt that his expression of disgust was sincere. But did this discovery give any reason for Dummett to change his mind about the influence of Frege on analytical philosophy, or the importance of his views on mathematics? All those qualities that made the Grundlagen such a significant book, in Dummett’s opinion, were still there. Admiration of the philosophy is not admiration of the man who produced the philosophy.
Bernard Gert was a philosopher; his son Joshua and his daughter Heather are both philosophers, each with a spouse who is also a philosopher.
I guess this is a pretty niche theme — the influence of Frege’s father on Frege’s thought — but people interested in delving still further into it, after reading the above-linked article, may want to consider an additional dimension: the influence of the elder Frege and idealism in Germany on Gottlob Frege’s view of Christianity. K.A. Frege was influenced Kant’s philosophy of religion (specifically the concept of Urbild), and (as the OP article points out) by the ‘learning-process’ view of the history of religion found in Schelling and Hegel. In the early 1920s, when Frege develops his far-right, ultranationalist and antisemitic view of Christianity as a naturalistic (and nationalistic) critique of “the devils” of “greed” and “pride,” he draws on his father’s work, arguably, although much more on the Kantian than on the German-Idealist strands, and even more on the ‘history of religions school’ of historical theology, esp. Wilhelm Bousset, which was in the spirit of his father’s de-mythologizing view of Christianity (influenced by Jena’s Carl von Hase and Wismar’s Reimarus).
Here’s a passage from ‘Frege and Fascism’ (Routledge, 2025, pp. 165-166) where I add some of these details:
“Although the younger Frege himself nowhere mentions his father’s work on the life of Jesus, it would be hard to imagine that he did not know it quite well. Karl A. Frege (1809–1866) wrote two works on broadly theological matters, both of which were self-published by him in Wismar. One of these, arguably the less relevant here (because its primary themes concern philosophical theology, rather than the life of Jesus), was a book on the ‘consciousness of God’ as it emerges in the course of human history, especially the history of European culture. The book was called Die Entwicklung des Gottesbewusstseins in der Menschheit, in allgemeinen Umrissen dargestellt (The Development of the Consciousness of God in Humanity, Presented in General Outlines). That work falls broadly within the German Idealist tradition of Schelling and Hegel, proposing a conception of ‘world ages’ that form a sequence, leading from a pre-historical, nature-bound antiquity, through the phase of historical cultivation, and culminating in a dawning age of moral freedom. On this view, the sequence of world ages follows the pattern of a learning process or an unfolding maturation trajectory, leading humanity from crude and relatively uncultured beginnings, imbued with fear and superstition, towards more refined and sophisticated modern forms of ‘God-consciousness,’ where religious expressions are increasingly post-mythological and reason-sensitive. Already in this book, however, Karl A. Frege introduces a theme found in his son Gottlob Frege’s work: the claim that an informed study of the historical Jesus is the key to understanding in a post-mythological way the core teaching of Jesus, unobstructed by the conventional covering of religious dogmas. For the most part, though, the elder Frege’s work on ‘the development of consciousness of God’ over time does not seem to have directly influenced his son, Gottlob Frege. The younger Frege shows no evident interest in classical German Idealism’s project of reinterpreting historical sequences as learning processes.
“The case seems a little different, however, when we consider Karl A. Frege’s other, earlier theology book, in which he attempts to re-narrate the life of Jesus, with the aim of presenting to young Germans—in particular, to the students at the girls’ school that he founded and directed—an ‘Urbild’ or archetype of human nobility and piety that they could emulate. This book, Das Leben Jesu als treffliches Urbild, was already in its second edition by 1840, hence still in the early days of what historical theologians later came to call the ‘quest for the historical Jesus.’….Indeed, the elder Frege explicitly describes his motivation in terms that anticipate a view of the relevance of the historical Jesus that later reappears in the pages of his son’s 1924 Tagebuch, namely, the idea that Jesus could serve as a model, a prototype or archetype (‘Urbild’) to emulate with piety, enthusiasm and zeal, the better to resist the temptations of self-interest and worldly gain….”
Karl A. Frege’s “Die Entwicklung des Gottesbewusstseins in der Menschheit” is not primarily standing in the tradition of Schelling or Hegel, but it is quite clearly written from the point of view of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause’s “Wesenlehre”, i.e. his panentheistic process philosophy. For more on Krause’s system, see my short introduction (open access): https://www.peterlang.com/document/1403663
Hans Sluga severely criticised Dummett’s view shortly after the publication of “Frege’s Philosophy of Language”. Sluga expressed his criticism in his review of the book, in his book Gottlob Frege, and in several of his papers. The 1970s were spent in dispute between Sluga and Dummett over the historical sources of Frege’s philosophy and analytic philosophy in general. It’s surprising that the general philosophical public seems unaware of this, and even more surprising that Lemanski does not cite Sluga’s work. This just confirms the need for people to pay more attention to works in the history of analytic philosophy.
That’s not the only knee-jerk reaction here.
One way of framing Lemanski’s paper is as an investigation into the beginning or origin of analytic philosophy. Another is as an investigation into the influences that shaped Gottlob Frege. Here’s the way Lemanski puts it:
This latter framing seems to me to offer a more interesting investigation, and one that doesn’t require we have any position on when the thing we call “analytic philosophy” began.
Looking back, it’s clear that Frege’s work in the foundations of mathematics is an important part of analytic philosophy coming to be — not least because of the way Russell and Whitehead deployed type theory in Principia Mathematica to disarm the objection Russell raised against Frege’s Basic Law V, followed by the way Church’s type theory was wedded with Carnap’s possible-world semantics in Montague’s agenda-setting essays on natural language semantics at UCLA in the late 1960s. Given the uses to which the new logic was put by figures in central Europe in the interwar period, and the transplanting of many of these figures in the U.S. before and after the second world war (Reichenbach and Carnap were both at UCLA when Montague was there), followed by the subsequent development of a tradition in analytic philosophy, Frege stands as an important figure in the formation of that tradition. And if it turns out his father, or the German idealists, were important in the generation of Frege’s thought, so much the better to be aware of it.
At the same time, and echoing something a few people have said here already, one sometimes suspect that a low-grade historical obliviousness is hedging in the boundaries of these conversations. It’s fine to speak of the “origins” of analytic philosophy, and to treat analytic philosophy as a thing we can meaningfully talk about and investigate. But analytic philosophy isn’t a monolith so much as a landscape peppered with monoliths. While there are regions of architectural unity, much of the landscape is a hodge-podge, some of it in ruins, with lots of it never really put to use in the first place. And everything was shaped by contingent historical and institutional conditions.
Consider how different analytic philosophy would be had one thing been different: Tarski (a Jew) not making it out of Poland on the last ship to leave before the Nazis invaded. Straightaway we know the following: the conversations among Tarksi, Quine, and Carnap at Harvard in 1940-41 wouldn’t have happened; Tarski wouldn’t have supervised Montague’s thesis at Berkeley; Montague’s mastery of model-theoretic formal semantics might have been much less pronounced; and Davidson wouldn’t have been introduced to Tarski’s essays on a visit to Berkeley where he (Davidson) presented an essay on Carnap’s intensional semantics.
This isn’t to say that versions of these orientational monoliths of analytic philosophy wouldn’t have been erected eventually. But it is to suggest that the thing we call “analytic philosophy” doesn’t really have a “beginning”, “middle”, and “end” in the way, say, a star or an organism does.
Elmer Kremer and Michael Kremer
And Philip Kremer.
Robert Audi and Paul Audi.
David George Ritchie (26 October 1853 — 3 February 1903), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at St Andrews, President of the Aristotelian Society (1898). His son Arthur David Ritchie (1891-1967) began his academic career as an instructor in chemistry at the University of Manchester but then took up the Sir Samuel Hall Chair as Professor of Philosophy at that school. The younger Ritchie wrote on scientific method and later became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh.
One of Socrates’s students, Aristippus of Cyrene, had a daughter, Arete of Cyrene, who led her father’s Cyrenaic school of philosophy. She taught philosophy to her son Aristippus the Younger, whose nickname was “Mother-taught” (μητροδίδακτος). [I’m relying on the Wikipedia entries for these three Cyrenaics.]
An ancient Roman philosopher, Quintus Sextius the Elder, might have been the father of the philosopher Sextius Niger. [Wikipedia again]
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, had a younger brother, James Seth, who was the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the same university.
One of Socrates’s students, Aristippus of Cyrene, founded the Cyrenaic school of philosophy. His daughter, Arete of Cyrene, led that school after his death. She taught her son, Aristippus the Younger (whose nickname was “mother-taught”), who “may have formalized” that school’s principles (according to Wikipedia).
David George Ritchie, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at St Andrews and President of the Aristotelian Society (1898), had a philosopher son: Arthur David Ritchie (1891-1967). The younger Ritchie began his academic career teaching chemistry at the University of Manchester but then took up the Sir Samuel Hall chair as Professor of Philosophy at that school. He wrote on scientific method and became the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh.
When Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, his brother, James Seth, was the Professor of Moral Philosophy in the same department.
Didn’t the first Seth change his name to Pringle-Pattison in order to gain an inheritance? John McTaggart Ellis became John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart in order to gain an inheritance from his mother’s childless brother, who wanted the McTaggart name to continue. It’s an interesting category: philosophers who changed their names in order to gain an inheritance.
Yes, the first Seth really lucked out. His cousin’s wife, Anne Elizabeth Pringle-Pattison, left the Pringle estate, the Haining (approx 160 acres located south of Edinburgh) to Andrew Seth in 1898 on the condition that he take the name ‘Pringle-Pattison.’ The property fell out of his family’s possession after WWII, but Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison’s grandson, Andrew Nimmo-Smith (a lawyer), bought it. When Nimmo-Smith died in 2009, he left the property to the people of Selkirk (in a charitable trust). According to a BBC report (24 August 2010), Nimmo-Smith also left £140,000 to animal welfare charities and £25,000 to the approximately 30 cats that lived with him in the Haining.
An interesting category, indeed.
Sissela and Hilary Bok
Andre and Quill Kukla
Anandi and Jagdish Hattiangadi
Another Father /Daughter combo: Kit Fine and his daughter Cordelia Fine, billed on her Wikipedia Page as ‘a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, writer, and science communicator, who lives in Australia’. Wide-ranging as he is, she is even more so. Kit Fine’s ex-wife Anne is a distinguished author, primarily of children’s books, and their other daughter Ione is a psychologist and neuroscientist. (All four have their own Wikipedia pages).
On the Mackies.
JL Mackie (1917-1981) was the son of Alexander (1876-1955) an influential d Professor of Education in Australia with a n MA in Philosophy from Edinburgh and stints as a stand-in philosophy professor at Sydney. JL begat a philosopher daughter, Penelope Mackie (1953-2022), and a philosopher son David Mackie, currently Head of Philosophy at d’Overbroeck’s College, having done time as a fellow and tutor at a series of Oxford colleges. David has a daughter Hilary Mackie who is. a distinguished classicist at Rice.
Peter Geach: “My father, George Hender Geach, was at that time working in the Indian Educational Service; he became Professor of Philosophy at Lahore.” (“A Philosophical Autobiography,” 1991)
Gaston Bachelard’s daughter, Suzanne Bachelard, taught philosophy at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. The Wittgenstein scholar Gordon P. Baker had a son, Alan R. Baker, who’s a philosophy professor at Swarthmore.
When I started as a grad student at Princeton in 1992, there were four students in the Philosophy PhD program who had fathers who were philosophers: myself (father: Gordon Baker); Sarah Stroud (father: Barry Stroud); David Sosa (father: Ernest Sosa); Neil Delaney Jr. (father: Neil Delaney), and all four went on to become philosophy professors themselves.
How remarkable that, in this thread, analytic philosophers are suddenly capable of recognizing “analytic philosophy” as a meaningful term with a coherent implicature. I wonder whether they’ll retain this striking ability the next time somebody points out an unattractive feature of this methodology, instead of pretending not to understand where the allegations are coming from, or at what they are directed.
Fair. But I wonder if the critics will remember that “analytic philosophy” means very different things in different contexts. Some use it so broadly that Popper or Quine count as “analytic”, even though Popper hated Wittgenstein and the mid-20th century focus on language and Quine of course famously rejected the idea that analyticity could be made sufficiently clear… In this context about its “origins” people are using it in a narrower way, I think.
Paul, Leo, and Louis Groarke, identical triplets, all got PhDs in Philosophy and taught Philosophy in different universities in Canada.
Paul and Kaila Draper are identical twins who both had careers in academic Philosophy..
Ramon Lemos, was a longtime member of the department at the University of Miami, and two of his sons are philosophers: John Lemos (McCabe Professor of Philosophy, Coe College) and Noah Lemos (Leslie and Naomi Legum Distinguished Professor – William and Mary).
Charles Peirce, father of Semiosis (and much else), father philosophy professor at Harvard.
Heinrich Gomperz, philosophy professor at Vienna. After fleeing Austria in the ’30s, he became a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. His father, Theodor, was a professor of classical philology at Vienna. His work focused on ancient Greek philosophy.
Gomperz senior was vey much a philosopher, being a friend and confidant of John Stuart Mill whose works he had translated into German. Apparently Gomperz had the hots for Mill’s step-daughter and collaborator, Helen Taylor, but Mill told him ‘I do not think you have a chance’. Evidently he found consolation with the eventual Frau Gomperz: hence Gomperz junior.
Lemanski’s paper presents Alexander Frege as a dubious answer to what seems to me a non-problem, namely ‘how a mathematician like Frege was able to acquire such knowledge of philosophy or why he was interested in philosophy at all?’ The question presupposes a thesis that is obviously false, namely that it is very difficult (borderline impossible) for somebody trained in one discipline to acquire a competence or to develop an interest in another without external stimulus from some mentor. It isn’t. You see, there are these things called ‘libraries’ and these things called ‘bookshops’, both of which are fairly common in university towns such as Jena and Göttingen. They contain these things called ‘books’ that can be borrowed from the one or bought from the other. Smart people can read the books, thereby assimilating their contents. This includes contents concerning topics outside (or bordering on) their home discipline. In addition to books, there are these people called ‘fellow-students’ or ‘colleagues’ some of whom may work in other disciplines. Smart people can pick up a lot from picking their brains (though this is less likely in Frege’s case since he does not seem to have been a very sociable person). No need for a parent with a training in the non-AOS discipline to get them going, though this, of course, can help.
To illustrate just how silly Lemanski’s question is, let’s consider a contemporary parallel: Graham Priest.
Graham Priest, like Frege, is a philosopher logician, famous as one of the pioneers of paraconsistent logic, and an expert on non-classical logics generally. In his numerous works, Priest cites or discusses Schlick, Waismann, Hume, Heidegger, Hegel, Kant, Nagarjuna, Dogen, Berkeley, Wittgenstein, Russell, Quine, Ockham, Meinong, Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, and probably many more. (I briefly checked his website and the indices to a couple of his books.) He has a strong interest in Buddhist Philosophy. ‘How was a mathematician like Priest [with an MA in Math from Cambridge and a PhD in Math from the LSE and no formal training in philosophy] able to acquire such a wide knowledge of philosophy and specifically Buddhism? Indeed why is he interested in philosophy at all?’ Was Priest perhaps the son of a philosopher who imbibed some philosophy (and an interest in the subject) via discussions around the family the breakfast table? Was there perhaps a parental interest in Buddhism? NO. Priest’s Dad was a manual worker (who worked such long hours the Priest saw little of him) his Mother a homemaker with no higher education. There was not a lot of high culture in the Priest family home. In so far as there was an awareness of religion, it was Christian. Priest acquired both his knowledge of philosophy and his interest in the subject from reading books and talking to people (and being blessed with both a massive intellect and an enquiring mind). Since Frege too had both access to books and colleagues to talk to, and since he too was clearly blessed with a massive intellect and an enquiring mind, we don’t need to resort to speculative breakfast-table discussions to explain either his interest in philosophy or his knowledge of the subject.
Indeed, Lemanski’s question is even sillier in Frege’s case than in Priest’s, since Frege was NOT exclusively trained as a mathematician. Though he was mostly what we would now call a STEM student, concentrating on Maths, Physics and Chemistry, in his final year as an undergraduate at Jena he took a course with the famous Kantian scholar Kuno Fischer on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He also took a course with Hermann Lotze as part of his doctoral studies at Göttingen. Of course this does not mean that he was influenced by them if that means deriving any of his key ideas from either Fischer or Lotze.. But in philosophy, the most important influences are often negative. The starting point for philosophical reflection is very often ‘That can’t be right!’. This stimulates the budding philosopher into trying to work out what is wrong with ‘that ‘ (whatever ‘that’ may be) before going on to refute it. Dummett makes this point wrt Frege: ‘It was nevertheless borne in on me that, even if I was right to think that Frege had not been greatly influenced by others, it had still been a mistake to attempt to write about his thought concerning less specialized areas of philosophy in disregard of the ideas of his contemporaries: only against that setting was it possible to understand what Frege regarded it as necessary to argue against and why he expressed himself as he did.’ This comes out in Dummett’s commentary on on Frege’s ‘Kernsätze Zur Logik’ which only really make sense as a set of critical ruminations on Lotze’s Logik in which he directly contradicts some of Lotze’s key claims.
Now Frege was a radical realist about both the realms of meaning and the Mathematical realm (a common view among mathematicians who often feel that they are directly acquainted with sets or numbers.) . Thus he reacted against one of the key doctrines of most forms of idealism, namely that reality in general is in some sense mind-dependent. And this does not just mean that reality is independent of individual minds but that it is independent of Mind as such. In the course of a detailed compare-and-contrast between Frege and Lotze (Frege as a Realist) Dummett notes that for Lotze the highest form of objectivity is inter-subjectivity whereas for Frege real objectivity is needed to explain inter-subjectivity. Now it would be odd if Frege was a radical realist wrt the realm of mathematics but an idealist wrt the wirklich or material world, and indeed he seems to have been a realist with respect both. So Frege was radically anti-idealist thinker, possibly stimulated to be so by his direct encounters with idealist philosophers such as Fischer, Lotze and perhaps Alexander Frege, though just as likely by their books. (Alexander seems to have been literary intellectual with a focus on moral and religious issues. Gottlob, by contrast was a science-sider in the English sense the word. Given the courses he took at Jena and Göttingen and the subject of his dissertation, , he looks like somebody who was reacting against his late father rather than continuing in his footsteps.)
What about the echoes of Krause and Fortrage that Lemanski detects in Frege? I don’t know enough to comment in detail but in so far as there are such echoes, I would suggest the they derive not from Gottlob’s conversations with Alexander but from Alexander’s Library which Gottlob would have inherited. No need for mentors or breakfast table conversations when books can do the trick.
Here is another article on Karl Christian Friedrich Krause’s importance as a logician, also briefly mentioning Frege: https://philpapers.org/archive/MEIKCF.pdf