ABSTRACT
frege and HEIDEGGER lie so far apart on the philosophical spectrum that any suggestion that we might, profitably discuss them together is apt to seem implausible. Frege's philosophical project is to clarify the foundations of mathematics; this leads him to a logical investigation in the course of which he invents most of the apparatus of modern symbolic logic. Heidegger embarks on a more general project, the elucidation of Being itself, which he approaches via an investigation of human life (and, famously, death). The projects and methods of the two philosophers are so different that there is no obvious arena for a fruitful dialogue between them. Indeed, it is fairly safe to suppose that each would have regarded the other's work as alien to his own: Frege would likely have regarded Heidegger's "existential analytic of Dasein" as a work of anthropology and social psychology that is of dubious relevance to philosophical questions, while Heidegger seems to have regarded the introduction of symbolic logic into philosophy as an attempt to reduce all thought to mere "calculation" and to avoid what Heidegger calls "essential thinking." 1
