The Foundations of Arithmetic

The Foundations of Arithmetic

Title page of the original 1884 edition
Author	Gottlob Frege
Original title	Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Eine logisch-mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl
Translator	J. L. Austin
Country	Germany
Language	German
Subject	Philosophy of mathematics
Published	1884
Pages	119 (original German)
ISBN	0810106051
OCLC	650

The Foundations of Arithmetic (German: Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik) is a book by Gottlob Frege, published in 1884, which investigates the philosophical foundations of arithmetic. Frege refutes other idealist and materialist theories of number and develops his own platonist theory of numbers. The Grundlagen also helped to motivate Frege's later works in logicism.

The book was also seminal in the philosophy of language. Michael Dummett traces the linguistic turn to Frege's Grundlagen and his context principle.

The book was not well received and was not read widely when it was published. It did, however, draw the attentions of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who were both heavily influenced by Frege's philosophy. An English translation was published (Oxford, 1950) by J. L. Austin, with a second edition in 1960.^[1]