Rudolf Carnap Popular Books

Rudolf Carnap Biography & Facts

Rudolf Carnap (; German: [ˈkaʁnaːp]; 18 May 1891 – 14 September 1970) was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. Biography Carnap's father had risen from being a poor ribbon-weaver to be the owner of a ribbon-making factory. His mother came from an academic family; her father was an educational reformer and her oldest brother was the archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld. As a ten-year-old, Carnap accompanied Wilhelm Dörpfeld on an expedition to Greece. Carnap was raised in a profoundly religious Protestant family, but later became an atheist.He began his formal education at the Barmen Gymnasium and the Carolo-Alexandrinum Gymnasium in Jena. From 1910 to 1914, he attended the University of Jena, intending to write a thesis in physics. He also intently studied Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason during a course taught by Bruno Bauch, and was one of very few students to attend Gottlob Frege's courses in mathematical logic. During his university years he became enthralled with the German Youth Movement.While Carnap held moral and political opposition to World War I, he felt obligated to serve in the German army. After three years of service, he was given permission to study physics at the University of Berlin, 1917–18, where Albert Einstein was a newly appointed professor. Carnap then attended the University of Jena, where he wrote a thesis defining an axiomatic theory of space and time. The physics department said it was too philosophical, and Bruno Bauch of the philosophy department said it was pure physics. Carnap then wrote another thesis in 1921, under Bauch's supervision, on the theory of space in a more orthodox Kantian style, and published as Der Raum (Space) in a supplemental issue of Kant-Studien (1922). Frege's course exposed him to Bertrand Russell's work on logic and philosophy, which put a sense of the aims to his studies. He accepted the effort to surpass traditional philosophy with logical innovations that inform the sciences. He wrote a letter to Russell, who responded by copying by hand long passages from his Principia Mathematica for Carnap's benefit, as neither Carnap nor his university could afford a copy of this epochal work. In 1924 and 1925, he attended seminars led by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and continued to write on physics from a logical positivist perspective. Carnap discovered a kindred spirit when he met Hans Reichenbach at a 1923 conference. Reichenbach introduced Carnap to Moritz Schlick, a professor at the University of Vienna who offered Carnap a position in his department, which Carnap accepted in 1926. Carnap thereupon joined an informal group of Viennese intellectuals that came to be known as the Vienna Circle, directed largely by Schlick and including Hans Hahn, Friedrich Waismann, Otto Neurath, and Herbert Feigl, with occasional visits by Hahn's student Kurt Gödel. When Wittgenstein visited Vienna, Carnap would meet with him. He (with Hahn and Neurath) wrote the 1929 manifesto of the Circle, and (with Hans Reichenbach) initiated the philosophy journal Erkenntnis. In February 1930 Alfred Tarski lectured in Vienna, and during November 1930 Carnap visited Warsaw. On these occasions he learned much about Tarski's model theoretic method of semantics. Rose Rand, another philosopher in the Vienna Circle, noted, "Carnap's conception of semantics starts from the basis given in Tarski's work but a distinction is made between logical and non-logical constants and between logical and factual truth... At the same time he worked with the concepts of intension and extension and took these two concepts as a basis of a new method of semantics."In 1931, Carnap was appointed Professor at the German University of Prague. In 1933, W. V. Quine met Carnap in Prague and discussed the latter's work at some length. Thus began the lifelong mutual respect these two men shared, one that survived Quine's eventual forceful disagreements with a number of Carnap's philosophical conclusions. Carnap, whose socialist and pacifist beliefs put him at risk in Nazi Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1935 and became a naturalized citizen in 1941. Meanwhile, back in Vienna, Schlick was murdered in 1936. From 1936 to 1952, Carnap was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. During the late 1930s, Carnap offered an assistant position in philosophy to Carl Gustav Hempel, who accepted and became one of his most significant intellectual collaborators. Thanks partly to Quine's help, Carnap spent the years 1939–41 at Harvard University, where he was reunited with Tarski. Carnap (1963) later expressed some irritation about his time at Chicago, where he and Charles W. Morris were the only members of the department committed to the primacy of science and logic. (Their Chicago colleagues included Richard McKeon, Charles Hartshorne, and Manley Thompson.) Carnap's years at Chicago were nonetheless very productive ones. He wrote books on semantics (Carnap 1942, 1943, 1956), modal logic, and on the philosophical foundations of probability and inductive logic (Carnap 1950, 1952). After a stint at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1952–1954), he joined the UCLA Department of Philosophy in 1954, Hans Reichenbach having died the previous year. He had earlier refused an offer of a similar job at the University of California, Berkeley, because accepting that position required that he sign a loyalty oath, a practice to which he was opposed on principle. While at UCLA, he wrote on scientific knowledge, the analytic–synthetic distinction, and the verification principle. His writings on thermodynamics and on the foundations of probability and inductive logic, were published posthumously as Carnap (1971, 1977, 1980). Carnap taught himself Esperanto when he was 14 years of age, and remained sympathetic to it (Carnap 1963). He later attended the World Congress of Esperanto in 1908 and 1922, and employed the language while traveling. Carnap had four children by his first marriage to Elizabeth Schöndube, which ended in divorce in 1929. He married his second wife, Elizabeth Ina Stöger, in 1933. Ina committed suicide in 1964. Philosophical work Below is an examination of the main topics in the evolution of the philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. It is not exhaustive, but it outlines Carnap's main works and contributions to modern epistemology and philosophy of logic. Der Raum From 1919 to 1921, Carnap worked on a doctoral thesis called Der Raum: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre (Space: A Contribution to the Theory of Science, 1922). In this dissertation on the philosophical foundations of geometry, Carnap tried to provide a logical basis for a theory of space and time in physics. Considering that Carnap was interested in pure mathematics, natural sciences and philosophy, his dissertation can be seen as an.... Discover the Rudolf Carnap popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Rudolf Carnap books.