Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers

by Philip Stokes

‘Socrates is wise’ can be analysed into two distinct parts. First, the subject of the sentence, ‘Socrates’, and second a property ascribed to the subject, namely ‘being wise’. This had been the received wisdom for over two thousand years and gave rise to some notoriously intractable philosophical puzzles, not least concerning the notion of substance and the ontological status of universals and particulars. Frege swept all this away by analysing sentences on a mathematical model of function and argument. Using this form of analysis, the sentence ‘Socrates is wise’ contains a function, ‘( ) is wise’, with ‘Socrates’ taking the place of argument for that function; in other words, filling the gap in the incomplete functional expression, ‘( ) is wise’. In mathematics, sentences such as ‘2 + 3’ may be analysed in terms of a function ‘( ) + ( )’ being completed by the arguments ‘2’ and ‘3’.

Functional programming