Gottlob Frege grew up in a household where language was engineered: his father wrote grammar textbooks on the logical structure of German, and his mother later ran the family school. This episode follows him from a geometry PhD at Göttingen to the 1879 Begriffsschrift, where he replaced two thousand years of Aristotelian logic with quantified variables that could finally distinguish sentences like every boy loves some girl from some girl is loved by every boy.

The hosts then trace his multi-decade quest to prove logicism, the letter from Bertrand Russell in 1903 that exposed a fatal paradox in Basic Law V just as the second volume of his masterwork reached the printers, and the painfully honest appendix he wrote in response. They also cover his 1892 paper on sense and reference, his opposition to psychologism, his isolated personal life, an ...