Frege: A Philosophical Biography

Another new book from CUP, this time Frege: A Philosophical Biography by the late Dale Jacquette.

I was looking forward to reading this, but I fear that it is going to be hard work, because Jacquette’s prose is (it has to be said) very longwinded and laboured. In the pages I have read so far, the text could — with no exaggeration — have been reduced in length by half, with no loss of content and with considerable gain for the reader. Just for this reason, wading through some 640(!) pages of this is not an entirely happy prospect.

And dipping into some later pages hasn’t made me particularly confident that this is going to be philosophically very insightful either. But we shall see. I would certainly like to learn more about Frege’s mathematical background and early working context, and it looks as if Jacquette has done a lot of homework and has an amount to say about this. I’ll report back!

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