Nietzsche's Dog, A Philosophy Study Circle: Reading Frege's Sense and Reference

Every fifth Saturday, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., join us on Google Meet: [https://meet.google.com/tnt-fnkp-uhp](https://meet.google.com/tnt-fnkp-uhp). In this session, we will read, analyse, and discuss Gottlob Frege’s seminal 1892 essay, 'Sense and Reference'. [https://drive.google.com/file/d/12T-hA__1bFSS5KXA9JsOCWvlsy5i_E7d/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/12T-hA__1bFSS5KXA9JsOCWvlsy5i_E7d/view?usp=sharing) \*\*\* Nietzsche’s Dog is our philosophy study circle. We meet every fifth Saturday of the month, tackle some prominent texts and excerpts by acclaimed philosophers and try to grasp their meanings and limits. Nietzsche called his pain and suffering a dog. His pain was as loyal, obtrusive, shameless, and clever as a dog. Coming together and reading philosophy is one way of doing away with some of that pain and suffering - the parts that come out of ignorance, the staleness of our thinking, and the rusting bolts of our old beliefs. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the father of modern analytical philosophy, said that philosophy's task is to show the fly out of the jar. In other words, reading and practising philosophy translates to problem-solving and critical thinking. As aspiring writers, we can never have enough of that. **The Text:** Gottlob Frege’s 1892 essay “On Sense and Reference” (Über Sinn und Bedeutung) is one of the foundational texts in the philosophy of language. In it, Frege distinguishes between two aspects of meaning: sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). He introduced this distinction to explain how two expressions can refer to the same thing yet convey different information. In the process, he created the conceptual foundation for much of analytic philosophy and modern linguistics; and reshaped how later philosophers think about meaning, truth, and cognition, influencing Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Saul Kripke. Reading and analysing this essay will help us understand how language connects thought to the world and why meaning cannot be reduced to mere reference.​ Below is the link to the complete essay. [https://drive.google.com/file/d/12T-hA__1bFSS5KXA9JsOCWvlsy5i_E7d/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/12T-hA__1bFSS5KXA9JsOCWvlsy5i_E7d/view?usp=sharing) **The Host**: Ishita Lohani is an aspiring writer. She has been an avid philosophy reader, deeply interested in the works of continental philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl. She has a soft spot for postmodernists like Derrida, Guattari, Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. She is also a Young India Fellow, where she pursued cognitive science and philosophy through the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Searle, Dennett, and Chomsky.