1. EITHER: (A) What is wrong with Frege’s treatment of identity in his
Begriffsschrift?
OR: (B) Critically assess the role of functions in Frege’s account of
predication and quantification.
2. EITHER: (A) Explain the role of extensions of concepts in Frege’s
development of arithmetic. How did they give rise to Russell’s
paradox?
OR: (B) ‘But it is surely obvious that every theory is only a scaffolding
or schema of concepts together with their necessary relations to one
another, and that the basic elements can be thought of in any way one
likes.’ (HILBERT) Discuss.
3. Expound the theory of denoting concepts presented in Russell’s The
Principles of Mathematics. Was he right to abandon it in ‘On
Denoting’?
4. Why did Russell aim to construct things from appearances? Did he
succeed?
5. What did Wittgenstein think was wrong with Russell’s multiple relation
theory of judgment? Was Wittgenstein’s own theory any better?
6. Critically assess Wittgenstein’s account of objects and their forms in
the Tractatus.
7. ‘The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there
remains the reality co­ordinated with it.’ (Tractatus, 5.64) Discuss.
8. Was Ramsey correct to criticise Russell’s theory of types for consisting
of two distinct parts which were ‘unified by being both deduced in a
rather sloppy way from the vicious-circle principle’?
9. Was Ramsey correct to argue that no fundamental classification of
objects can be based on the distinction between the subject and
predicate of a proposition?
10. Compare and contrast the views on truth of at least two of the authors
set for this paper.