Fate has not been kind to Gottlob Frege and his work. His logical achievement, which dwarfed anything done by logicians over the preceding two thousand years, remained all but ignored by his contemporaries. He liberated logic from the straight-jacket of psychologism only to see others claim credit for it. He expounded his theory in a monumental two-volume work, only to find an insidious error in the very foundations of the system. He successfully challenged the rise of Hilbert-style formalism in logic only to see everybody follow in the footsteps of those who had lost the argument. Ideas can live with lack of recognition. Even ignored and rejected, they are still there ready to engage the minds of those who find their own way to them. They are in danger of obliteration, however, if they are enlisted to serve conceptions and purposes incompatible with them. This is what has been happening to Frege's theoretical bequest in recent decades. Frege has become, belatedly, something of a philosophical hero. But those who have elevated him to this status are the intellectual heirs of Frege's Hilbertian adversaries, hostile to all the main principles underlying Frege's philosophy. They are hostile to Frege's platonism, the view that over and above material objects, there are also functions, concepts, truth-values, and thoughts. They are hostile to Frege's realism, the idea that thoughts are independent of their expression in any language and that each of them is true or false in its own right. They are hostile to the view that logic, just like arithmetic and geometry, treats of a specific range of extra-linguistic entities given prior to any axiomatization, and that of two alternative logics—as of two alternative geometries—only one can be correct. And they are no less hostile to Frege's view that the purpose of inference is to enhance our knowledge and that it therefore makes little sense to infer conclusions from premises which are not known to be true. We thus see Frege lionized by exponents of a directly opposing theoretical outlook.
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To the most advanced among the exponents of the New Age logic even this is not enough. Why, they ask, cling dogmatically to consistency ? Why not jettison the law of non-contradiction (...) Men of action (the Lenins and Hitlers of this world) have long been familiar with the advantages of embracing contradictions. They know that it not only neatly solves all problems in logic proper, but provides an intellectual key to 'final solutions' in other fields of human endeavour.
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