Gottlob Frege's occasional writings are all collected in the present volume, about half of them now first Englished. They form a corpus almost as great and as important as his three systematic works. The early mathematical writings, including the dissertations that won him his doctorate and his venia docendi, show what goals and methods appealed to him as a mathematician: they deserve study by anyone investigating the motivation and the starting-point of Frege's great works on the foundations of mathematics. The essays on the philosophy of language belonging to his middle period are yet more significant: they provide, it might be said, the foundation of the foundations. Here we have them in full, together with Frege's controversial writings and his attempt to come to terms with the views of Husserl, Cantor, and others. From a later period we have the two
scries of articles on the foundations of geometry, the topic to which he turned after his work on the foundations of arithmetic had reached a conclusion that would have seemed triumphant but for the perhaps
fatal flaw on which Russell struck his finger. From the last years of Frege's life come the three chapters (all that were published) of his Logical Investigations', as fresh an approach to the philosophy of logic and of language as can be imagined. But it is impertinent to praise Frege: the purpose of the present remarks is only to point out that this volume contains some of his most characteristic works.