Notions of Existence in Frege

Volume 9.8 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access:

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/448

It features an article by Dolf Rami, entitled, “Notions of Existence in Frege.” Here is the abstract:

In this paper, I aim to present the main components of my non-standard interpretation of Frege’s views on existence to the English-speaking public (Rami 2017a, 2018, 2019a,b). First, I will outline the standard interpretation and show how to a great but not full extent the standard interpretation can be justified on the basis of Frege’s writings. Second, I show that the main error of the standard interpretation consists in the assimilation of the contents of the ordinary language expressions “exist” (“existiert”) and “there is” (“es gibt”) according to Frege. Third, I evaluate possible sources for this unfounded assimilation. After that, I outline my alternative interpretation that distinguishes in opposition to other non-standard interpretations between a substantive and a deflationary part of Frege’s complete conception of existence in analogy to Frege’s analysis of truth and negation. Fifthly, I justify my interpretation by the reconstruction of a so far overlooked master argument of Frege against the above-mentioned assimilation. In the last section, I introduce and discuss four objections against my interpretation that came to my attention.

JHAP is a free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!