Bryan Magee and A.J. Ayer, a famous philosopher in his own right, here give an overview of Frege's project and Bertrand Russell's reaction to it.
Watch on Youtube.
The whole first clip here is just an overview of Frege, with his sense and reference distinction coming in around minute 8. In part two, Ayer and Magee talk up Michael Dummett just like I did on the podcast, and then close to minute 4, the conversation shifts to Russell and stays there through most of the rest of the series of clips.
One interesting point is around 6:50 where they discuss why Frege's work in mathematics didn't catch on while Russell's very similar work did: the dominance of psychologism in Germany and the English incompetence with languages, an exception being Russell, who was brought up with German governesses.
Part 3 gets into Russell's theory of descriptions, with a name-drop of Meinong, and then into some other work of Russell's empiricist epistemology that we didn't discuss. (Ayer has a high opinion of The Problems of Philosophy,
Ayer characterizes Russell as a verificationist (during one portion of his life) who thinks that all scientific statements can be reduced to sentences about sense data. This emphasis is unsurprising, as Ayer himself is famous for his association with logical positivism, discussed on our second Wittgenstein episode. To see him talking about that, watch this. Part 4 of this series eventually turns to Ayer talking about his own points of agreement with Russell. Part 5 finally gets back to talking to Frege a bit, specifically about the relative influence of Frege, Russell, and Moore to their generation (this was filmed in 1987, only two years before Ayer's death).
-Mark Linsenmayer
These Magee interviews are tops. Sometimes I just play them in the background to have Magee’s voice as ambient noise. Definitely should be sampled for an Orb remix.