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There's too much focus on Frege (as well as Russell and Wittgenstein) in analytic philosophy.

You would think people such as Boole, Peirce, Łukaiewicz, Tarski, Brouwer, Heyting, Gentzen, Prawitz, Girard, and Martin-Löf are mere footnotes in the history of logic. Yet their work is more relevant and used by working mathematicians and computer scientists.




This is a brilliant comment. Thank you.

Each in turn:

Boole invented propositional logic. Peirce supposedly invented a lot, but got overlooked. Łukaiewicz, I'm not sure. Tarski employed quantifier elimination to prove the decidability of various theories like Euclidean geometry. Brouwer invented intuitionistic logic, and a(n arguably) viable approach to doing analysis and topology intuitionistically. Heyting provided semantics to intuitionistic logic. Gentzen created the proof calculus Natural Deduction which resembles informal proofs (as well as the closely related proof calculus Sequent Calculus). Prawitz I don't know. Girard, I don't know. Martin-Löf derived Dependently Typed Lambda Calculus using the Curry-Howard correspondence.

I guess all this stuff gets overlooked because Russell's goal was very ambitious: He wanted to connect formal logic with everyday language, and how to perform sound everyday reasoning. In that sense, his ambition was similar to the Stoics. The above stuff mostly doesn't address this use-case.


The people I mentioned and their work are intentionally overlooked because it doesn't fit a dogma around Platonic Realism and Classical Logic.


And Gödel, of course.




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