"Did Frege Plagiarize the Stoics"

Susanne Bobzien (Oxford University), Rachel Boddy (Utrecht University), Sosseh Assaturian (University of Texas at Austin)

“Did Frege Plagiarize the Stoics?: A Durham-Chicago Colloquium on Logic and Language with Susanne Bobzien, Sosseh Assaturian, and Rachel Boddy”

In 2021, Susanne Bobzien published a widely discussed essay in which she argues that Frege plagiarized the Stoics on a large scale in his work on philosophical logic. The point of her essay is to demonstrate carefully by means of detailed evidence that there are so many parallels both in formulation and ‒more importantly‒ in content between the Stoics and Frege that one would be hard pressed to brush them off as coincidence. Additionally, a cluster of corroborating historical data is adduced, showing how easy it would have been for Frege to plagiarize the Stoics.

In this symposium, Bobzien will offer a summary of her main conclusions with some additional explanations, followed by comments from Sosseh Assaturian and Rachel Boddy and general discussion.