they had not yet devised the language with which to express fully, and to

manipulate, expressions involving the concepts “some” and “all.” Propositions

having forms like “Some women overcome every hurdle,” and “Some hurdles
are overcome by every woman,” as they might occur in argument, did not
yield to the logical language then at hand. A new way to express these con-
cepts accurately, a new Begriffsschrift, had to be invented.

Frege did this. Within this new formal language his development of
quantification, explained and applied in this chapter, became a turning point in
modern logic. Virtually all twentieth-century logicians were influenced by
Frege's work. His larger objective was to show how logic provides the most
fundamental principles of all inference, an enterprise later advanced by
Bertrand Russell, with whom he corresponded. In Frege’s Foundations of
Arithmetic (1884) he sought to explain these connections in non-symbolic
terms; later, in his Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893 and 1903), he advanced the
great project by building upon symbolic axioms derived from his earlier
Concept Script.

Is the quality of a logician’s work to be judged in the light of his

character and political views? Bitter and introverted, Frege hated Catholics,
hated the French, hated socialists, and above all hated the Jews, whose
total expulsion from Germany he actually helped to plan. In his diary
he made it clear that Adolf Hitler was his hero. Frege died in 1925, a
loyal Nazi.