Frege on Language, Logic, and Psychology

Eva Picardi (1948-2017) was one of the most influential Italian analytic philosophers of her generation. She taught for forty years at the University of Bologna, raising three generations of students. This volume presents a selection of Picardi's essays on Frege's philosophy of logic, language, and psychology. Together, these papers provide a close look at the milieu within which Frege operated, and serve to highlight the relevance of his work for contemporary debates, particularly in the philosophy of language.
One strand in Picardi's work on Frege concerns understanding and contextualizing Frege's anti-psychologism. Picardi contends that Frege was motivated by semantic considerations, much more so than by adherence to Kantian transcendentalism. Furthermore, Picardi draws on her deep knowledge of German, and the fact that she was a native speaker of Italian, to reconstruct the intricacies of Frege's relationship with other logicians of his time-both in Germany, like Kerry and Sigwart, and in Italy, like Peano and his school. Picardi's work shows how the historical and the theoretical (typically treated as separate in contemporary analytic philosophy, even in competition), complement and enrich one another.

The late Eva Picardi, one of the leading Italian analytic philosophers of her generation, was born in Reggio Calabria in 1948. She graduated from the University of Bologna and was awarded a DPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, supervised by Sir Michael Dummett. She is the author of Assertibility and Truth: A Study of Fregean Themes (Bologna, 1981) and La chimica dei concetti (Bologna 1994). Picardi taught at the University of Bologna from 1976 until 2016. She died in Bologna on April 23, 2017. Annalisa Coliva is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Irvine, where she is currently a Chancellor Fellow. She is the author of The Varieties of Self-Knowledge (Palgrave, 2016) and Relativism (with Maria Baghramian, Routledge, 2020), and the editor of Mind, Meaning and Knowledge: Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright (OUP, 2012), among several others.

- Introduction, by Annalisa Coliva - Part I: Frege in Context--Logic and Psychology - 1: The Logic of Frege's Contemporaries - 2: Kerry and Frege on Concept and Object - 3: Sigwart, Husserl, and Frege on Truth and Logic, or Is Psychologism Still a Threat? - 4: Frege's Anti-Psychologism - 5: Frege, Peano, and Russell on the Primitive Ideas of Logic - Part II: Frege's Philosophy of Language - 6: Über Sinn und Bedeutung: An Elementary Exposition - 7: The Chemistry of Concepts - 8: Assertion and Assertion Sign - 9: A Note on Dummett and Frege on Sense-Identity - 10: Michael Dummett's Interpretation of Frege's Context Principle: Some Reflections - Part III: Frege s Legacy - 11: Carnap Interpreter of Frege - 12: Frege and Davidson on Predication - 13: Davidson and Frege on the Unity of the Proposition: Some Remarks - 14: Was Frege a Proto-Inferentialist?