The Basic Laws of Arithmetic

The publication in 1893 of the first volume of Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is now widely regarded as a landmark in the history of thought; yet in retrospect it appears in a light rather different from that in which Frege himself viewed it.
To Frege it was the culmination of the work of half a lifetime, intended to afford a rigorous and detailed substantiation of the view (later known as 'logicism') that the content expressed by true propositions of arithmetic and analysis is not something of an irreducibly mathematical character, nor synthetic a priori as
Kant had held, nor again empirical in nature as J. S. Mill had held, but to the contrary, such propositions express truths of pure logic. Frege had broached this thesis in his Grundlagen der Arithmetik2 of 1884 for the case of the cardinal numbers, together with elaborate discussion and criticism of rival views and an attempt at a nontechnical philosophical justification of Frege's approach to the foundations of his subject. The criticisms were lethal and the justification imposing, but Frege was aware that even this did not place his view beyond all doubt.