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Gottlob Frege's philosophical and foundational work was by any token a major factor in the development of contemporary analytic philosophy. Some say he was the grandfather of the whole tradition, some think of him merely as its godfather. In either case, one might expect that his work has been studied exhaustively. However, this turns out not to have been the case. Someone — it was probably Burton Dreben — once said that the worst-known period in the history of philosophy is always the time fifty to a hundred years ago. The intensive work on Frege which has been going on in the last decade and a half at first seems to belie this dictum, but in a looser sense it fits the facts well. For it is only the developments of the last couple of decades, largely of the last few years when Frege's work has reached the hundred-years mark, that have brought to light facts and issues which have shown that our understanding of Frege was seriously incomplete. In recent literature, one can also find a wealth of new and sometimes controversial viewpoints. For instance, Jean van Heijenoort has called our attention to an important but neglected aspect of Frege's attitude to logic and language that he calls "logic as language". Hans Sluga has challenged on a large scale the received view of Frege as a lonely figure in nineteenth-century philosophy whose ancestry goes to medieval objectivists rather than his German predecessors.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-4552-4_1

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