Frege’s insight that logic is not something created by the human mind, but follows certain laws of its own, proved fundamental to further developments throughout history. For example, it led to the development of formal logic, which is concerned with the relationships between different kinds of statements, and the ways in which those relationships can be established. Formal logic was later applied to mathematics, leading to the discovery of mathematical truth independently of how our minds work. Frege argued that philosophical truths should follow the same pattern. We should be able to demonstrate them by means of argument and demonstration, just like we could prove mathematical truths. So, they’re objective, just like maths. And since they’re true regardless of us, they should exist independently of how our minds operate.
However, most contemporary philosophy has been based on epistemology, the study of how our brains form thoughts and beliefs. Epistemologists hold that there is a “true” answer to every question that we ask, but because we cannot access it directly, we must infer it through reasoning. Thus, we can never really know anything at all. Yet, this was all based on ‘subjective’ reasoning, and philosophers realized that to discover objective truths about our knowledge we must pursue them through logic instead of epistemology.
