Fundamentals

The "Fundamentals" section consists of the following essays:

0.0 Summary of Frege's Philosophy of Thought

0.1 Saying and Depicting

0.2 Fregean Ontology

0.3 The Primacy of Analysis

0.4 The Philosophical Method

0.5 Radical Multiplicity

The essays which are not yet in place are indicated by italics. Each essay which is extant consists of an abstract, which is reached first, and then a full text.

Summary of Contents

Having a section entitled "fundamentals" is based on the non-trivial assertion that there is a part of philosophy which deserves this label. Following Dummett, I identify the fundamentals of philosophy with what he calls "Frege's philosophy of thought". The radical novelty of Frege's ideas make it hard to find a simple and accurate title for the branch philosophy he created. The chapter cited records Dummett's struggles to find such a title. To understand properly "philosophy of thought" one must understand that the word "thought" here refers to the distinctively Fregean notion of "the sense of a sentence".

The first essay in this section, Summary of Frege's Philosophy of Thought, will sketch what I take to be the basic doctrines of his distinctly linguistic philosophy. I will make no attempt to be original here; my aim will be only to bring together in one place the key ideas and assertions which I consider to make up the philosophy of thought.

The short essay, Saying and Depicting, explores how, from a Fregean perspective, language is special, different from other means of communication. It does this, as the title suggests, by contrasting what it is to depict something with what it is to say something about it.

In the essay Fregean Ontology, I argue that the needs of the process of saying, that is, of the use of language, imposes on any ontology a necessary structure. This Fregean meta-ontology is neutral with respect to what there might be in the world, but supplies a set of categories, the filling of which is the business of ontology.

The essay The Primacy of Analysis explores the difference between knowledge and understanding. The process of gaining understanding is identified with the Fregean notion of analysing a sentence to articulate a thought. It is further identified with what theoretical science has to add to experimental science. The essay is an example of its own subject matter: it strives to gain an understanding of understanding, to articulate what we mean by articulation.

In the essay Radical Multiplicity, I shall explore the possible limitations of language. If the world possesses what I call "radical multiplicity", then some things about it will be unsayable.

The original example of this possibility lies in the theory of time, and is discussed further in essay 2.02 A defence of the A-theory of Time.