Fregel. Hegel and Frege, or Toward a Unified Conception of Identity Differenzschrift and Über Sinn und Bedeutung

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 20th century, grade: 1,3, University of Tubingen, course: Hegels Differenzschrift, language: English, abstract: In this paper, I propose that Hegel and Frege are more alike than currently thought. As Hegel and Frege are the founding fathers of the continental and analytic cultures of philosophy respectively, the salient argument of this paper is that the two cultures are, likewise, more alike than thought. I compare Hegel's first publication, often called Differenzschrift, to Frege's later works on the philosophy of language, Funktion und Begriff and Über Sinn und Bedeutung. I argue that in explicating the cognitive difference expressed by the concept of identity, Hegel develops a theory of pragmatics and semantics that has several similarities to the Mediated Reference Theory proposed by Frege. In doing so, I present an analytic account of Hegel's Absolute Identity determined by the equality of the co-domains produced by two compound functions. These functions are composed of semantic, pragmatic and epistemic constraints that evaluate the ontic content of a proposition.