Freges Erben?

This article begins by outlining the so-called “concept horse paradox” that results from Frege’s strict separation between concepts as functions and objects as arguments. It is argued that this paradox is indicative of a wider problem in philosophy, namely the tendency to reify the conceptual. Husserl is then presented as a philosopher who initially shows a keen eye for the danger of succumbing to this tendency but ends up giving in to it on a higher level in his theory of Wesensschau . It is shown that the reason for this lies in his conception of what an object is and how it is signified by a proper name. Cassirer, by contrast, takes Frege’s idea of the functionality of propositions more seriously than Frege himself when he draws the consequence that an object, too, must be thought as a functional unity and that a proper name is merely a proto-concept.