Thoughts, Thinking, & Thinkers (Tim Crane - 2017 Frege Lectures)

Professor Tim Crane gives a series of talks called “Thoughts, Thinking, & Thinkers“ as part of the 2017 Frege Lectures in theoretical philosophy at the University of Tartu. Note, this is a re-upload. One of Frege’s most famous principles was ‘always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective’. Given Frege’s influence on analytic philosophy, it is surprising that the philosophy of mind has not followed his advice here. Many discussions of intentionality or mental representation, for example, have concentrated exclusively on the nature of the proposition, whether in the specific version defended by Frege in ’The Thought’ (1918), or the versions defended by Bertrand Russell, David Lewis or Robert Stalnaker. But it is not obvious what the theory of the proposition has got to do with the psychological, as opposed to (say) the semantics of propositional attitude attributions. Frege himself distinguished between thoughts (propositions) and ideas, o