ABSTRACT
The importance of the distinction between concept and object for G. Frege is obvious. The Grundlagen was written to defend his thesis that while numbers are indeed objects, a statement of number contains an assertion about a concept. The problem on which, as I have argued, B. Russell expended so much intellectual energy in the Principles and finally thought he had solved with his conception of the variable and his theory of descriptions or incomplete symbols, was ruled out from the beginning by Frege. The idea, in Russell’s language, of something which, while it is eternally a term does not appear as a term in a proposition, is something which Frege ruled out from the beginning. He consequently had no use for any such notion as Russell’s special sense of denoting, since this, as we have seen, is a capacity possessed by just such terms.
