ABSTRACT
Gottlob Frege was by no means the first logician of the 19th century to seek to provide a new logical foundation to mathematical knowledge. Bernard Bolzano understood the main obstacle to the development of mathematics in his time to be the lack of proper logical resources–post-Cartesian theories of conceptual analysis and syllogistic inference being unfit for the purpose of modelling deductive reasoning in arithmetic and geometry. One important feature of Bolzano’s theory that has been almost constantly overlooked is the significance of his rejection of his predecessors’ account of conceptual relations in terms of inclusion in setting the stage for his own views on conceptual and propositional content. Bolzano’s contribution to the philosophy of logic and semantics bears on problems prima facie similar to those that later defined early analytical philosophy, such as for instance the pursuit of logical foundations for axiomatic disciplines and deductive theories.
