Frege signed the preface to Begriffsschrift in December of 1878, and it was published the following year by George Olms. Frege did little to connect up his own work with his contemporaries, either with the logical achievements of Boole, or the mathematical investigations of Dedekind. The only explicit references are to philosophers – Aristotle, Leibniz, and Kant. His previous work, which consisted mainly of reviews, gave no indication of the direction and creativity of his thinking. Like Athena, emerging full-grown from Zeus's brow, Frege's remarkable work bore no evidence of the genesis and growth of the ideas presented therein. There is little surprise at the reception his contemporaries gave Begriffsschrift: they did not know what to make of it.

Here are some of the achievements of Begriffsschrift:

First, Frege synthesized the two otherwise opposed traditions – the Stoic logic of the propositional connectives and the Aristotelian treatment of the quantifiers – into one system, and extended the Aristotelian treatment to include relations as well as properties. His function/argument analysis of propositions supplanted the subject/predicate distinction of traditional analysis, creating one of the first extensions of mathematical forms of analysis to domains other than arithmetic and geometry.

Second, propositions (1), (2), (8), (28), (31), and (41), together with the Rule of Inference, Modus Ponens – and a suitable substitution rule that is employed but never precisely stated – constitute a complete and consistent axiomatization of truth-functional logic.