Fregean abstraction, referential indeterminacy and the logical foundations of arithmetic (Q1430129)

The paper is devoted to the critical assessment of Frege's treatment in ``Grundlagen der Arithmetik'' of the problem of referential indeterminancy (usually called ``the Julis Caesar problem'') in defining cardinal numbers. It is argued that the Caesar problem is only spurious, not genuine, that the genuine Caesar problem deriving from Hume's Principle is a purely semantic one and that the prospects of removing it by explicitly defining cardinal numbers as objects which are not classes are presumably poor for Frege. The paper is finished by rejecting two closely connected theses concerning Caesar put forward by R. Heck.