ABSTRACT
While working on the Begriffsschrift he was fully convinced that the new logic would eventually provide the desired analysis of arithmetic. ‘To proceed farther along the path indicated,’ he wrote, ‘will be the object of…investigations which I shall publish immediately after this booklet’ (BS, p. xiv). In fact it took him another five years until he succeeded in pushing the project any further in the Foundations of Arithmetic. And what he then published was not exactly a continuation of the Begriffsschrift. The earlier work had concluded with the definition of the notion of a series, but the Foundations did’not simply continue from that point. It did not even make use of the symbolism of the Begriffsschrift. Instead, it examined in everyday language various philosophical views about numbers and arithmetic and, in the second half of the book, proposed a more adequate definition of the natural numbers and the concept of natural number.
