Modern Empiricism: Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle

1969 ◽  
pp. 257-320
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Stegmüller
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Rudolf Carnap

Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Elder
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Inductive Logic ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Analysis ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
Modal Theory ◽  
Foundations Of Probability

Rudolf Carnap was a German-American philosopher, and was widely regarded as one of most important of the 20th century. Politically engaged and inclined toward utopianism, Carnap was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a staunch advocate of the unity of science thesis, which held that the various physical sciences—physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology—could be unified into a single overarching theory. He worked across numerous fields, including the foundations of probability, modal theory, inductive logic, and semantics. His principal philosophical method was logical analysis, the final goal of which, he explained, is to analyze all assertions of science and everyday life alike, to identify the method of verification for each proposition. This method is grounded in the anti-metaphysical verificationist principle, according to which a statement is meaningful only if a method of verifying it is available. Carnap himself was well aware that his philosophy shared in the same spirit as modernist art. In his preface to Die Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928) Carnap claims that there is "an inner kinship" between the attitude on which his philosophical work is founded, "and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements."

„Bilder zukünftiger Vollendung“ – Der freistudentische Serakreis 1913 in den Tagebüchern und Briefen von und an Wilhelm Flitner

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meike G. Werner
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
The University

Conceived as a collage, this essay presents annotated excerpts from diaries and correspondences from the year 1913. It recreates a plethora of voices, especially of young intellectuals, progressive students and artists, focusing on the Sera Circle around the publisher Eugen Diederichs in Jena. Among the voices included are Wilhelm Flitner, who became a professor of education at the University of Hamburg, Rudolf Carnap, who later joined the Vienna Circle, Helene Czapski-Holzman, an artist and student of Max Beckmann, as well as Franz Roh, an art critic, photographer and collage-artist.

scholarly journals Intersubjective Accountability: Politics and Philosophy in the Left Vienna Circle

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Thomas Uebel
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
The Other ◽  
Epistemic Norm ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
National Economies

In different places Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath affirmed “a noteworthy agreement” and an “inner link” between their philosophy of science and political movements agitating for radical socio-economic change. Given the normative abstinence of Vienna Circle philosophy, indeed the metaethical commitments of its verificationism, this claim presents a major interpretive challenge that is only heightened when Neurath’s engagement for the socialization of national economies is taken into account. It is argued here that Carnap’s and Neurath’s positions are saved from inconsistency once some careful distinctions are understood and it is recognized that they, together with the other members of the Circle, adhered to an epistemic norm here called “intersubjective accountability.”

The Vienna Circle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Murray
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
Ernst Mach ◽  
Kurt Gödel ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Scientific Worldview

In 1922 Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) transformed the Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Society), a weekly reading group concerned with logical positivism, into an international assembly of academics known as der Weiner Kreis, or the Vienna Circle, which responded to recent developments within analytic philosophy by leading thinkers Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Early members included Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) and Otto Neurath (1882–1945). In 1929, Neurath published Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle), a pamphlet delineating the group’s rejection of metaphysics in favour of a scientific worldview predicated upon empirical phenomena.

Ogden and the Vienna Circle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McElvenny
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
World War ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
International Language ◽  
Basic English ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Intellectual Environment

This chapter investigates the contact and collaboration between C. K. Ogden and the Vienna Circle philosophers Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, which was chiefly driven by Ogden and centred around his project Basic English. The aspects of philosophy of language and social engagement that united Ogden with Neurath and Carnap are first examined in detail. Attention then turns to Neurath’s picture statistics, which through collaboration with Ogden evolved into Isotype, a contribution to the international language movement aligned with Basic. Finally, the relationship between Ogden, Carnap and Neurath as revealed in their correspondence is discussed, along with their shared fate in the post-World War II intellectual environment.

Gödel’s Theorem: An End and a Beginning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan von Plato
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Empiricism ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
University Of Vienna ◽  
Kurt Gödel ◽  
The World ◽  
The University ◽  
Gödel’S Theorem

This chapter discusses how Kurt Gödel found his theorem. He started to study physics at the University of Vienna in 1924, then changed to mathematics in 1926. That same year, he started attending the meetings of the Vienna Circle. These were weekly gatherings on philosophical topics that were headed by the philosopher Moritz Schlick. The philosophy of the circle came to be known as logical empiricism and had an enormous effect on the world of philosophy. Gödel later wanted to emphasize that he by no means shared all of the philosophical ideas of the circle. In the meetings, Gödel came to know the philosopher Rudolf Carnap and the mathematician Karl Menger, in whose mathematical colloquium he later presented many of his results.

Coincidences and Konstatierungen. Aspects of Methodological Creativity in Schlick's Science-Oriented Philosophizing

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Ingolf Max
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
General Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
Relativity And Gravitation ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

Moritz Schlick (1882–1936)—the integrating figure of the Vienna Circle—is an inspiring thinker who philosophizes in the immediate vicinity of contemporary physics in particular and other empirical sciences including psychology as well as ethics. In the context of interpreting Einstein’s (general) theory of relativity he wrote his „Space and time in contemporary physics, an introduction to the theory of relativity and gravitation“ [“Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik: zur Einführung in das Verständnis der Relativitäts- und Gravitations­theorie”]—first published in 1917. Schlick developed his conception of space-time coincidences of events. For the second edition he added the new chapter “X. Relations to Philosophy” using coincidences methodologically to connect terms which belong to different spaces of meaning. Starting in 1934—in the context of the debate on protocol sentences mainly with Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap—he offered his approach of Konstatierungen[1] to answer the question: “What is to be regarded as our fundament of knowledge?” I will shortly discuss Schlick’s term coincidence, move on to Konstatierungen and show some interrelations between them. I will argue for the methodological creativity in Schlick’s science-oriented philosophizing by explicating the inner structure of Konstatierungen within my 2-dimensional language of analysis. Finally, I will compare Schlick’s Konstatierungen with Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments and Frege’s thoughts as interrelated cases of two-dimensionally structured intermediate cases.

scholarly journals Roman Ingarden’s “The Logical Attempt at a New Formulation of Philosophy: A Critical Remark”

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Linsky
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Critical Remark ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
World Congress ◽  
New Formulation

Translated by Bernard Linsky This is the first English translation of Roman Ingarden’s paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Philosophy held in Prague in 1934: “Der Logistische Versuch einer Neugestaltung der Philosophie: Eine Kritische Bemerkung”, translated here as “The Logical Attempt at a New Formulation of Philosophy: A Critical Remark”. Also translated here are brief discussions by Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. These essays were published in the original German in the Proceedings of the Congress in 1936. This statement of Ingarden’s criticisms of the doctrines of the Vienna Circle has been mentioned in print, but his views have not been discussed, or indeed accurately reported to date.

scholarly journals On Gödel's Way In: The Influence of Rudolf Carnap

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Goldfarb
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Early Summer ◽  
Mathematical Truth ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
Modern Logic ◽  
Kurt Gödel ◽  
Representational Capacity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The University

The philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), although not himself an originator of mathematical advances in logic, was much involved in the development of the subject. He was the most important and deepest philosopher of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, or, to use the label Carnap later preferred, logical empiricists. It was Carnap who gave the most fully developed and sophisticated form to the linguistic doctrine of logical and mathematical truth: the view that the truths of mathematics and logic do not describe some Platonistic realm, but rather are artifacts of the way we establish a language in which to speak of the factual, empirical world, fallouts of the representational capacity of language. (This view has its roots in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but Wittgenstein's remarks on mathematics beyond first-order logic are notoriously sparse and cryptic.) Carnap was also the thinker who, after Russell, most emphasized the importance of modern logic, and the distinctive advances it enables in the foundations of mathematics, to contemporary philosophy. It was through Carnap's urgings, abetted by Hans Hahn, once Carnap arrived in Vienna as Privatdozent in philosophy in 1926, that the Vienna Circle began to take logic seriously and that positivist philosophy began to grapple with the question of how an account of mathematics compatible with empiricism can be given (see Goldfarb 1996).A particular facet of Carnap's influence is not widely appreciated: it was Carnap who introduced Kurt Gödel to logic, in the serious sense. Although Gödel seems to have attended a course of Schlick's on philosophy of mathematics in 1925–26, his second year at the University, he did not at that time pursue logic further, nor did the seminar leave much of a trace on him. In the early summer of 1928, however, Carnap gave two lectures to the Circle which Gödel attended, or so I surmise. At these occasions, Carnap presented material from his manuscript treatise, Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, that is, “Investigations into general axiomatics”, which dealt with questions of consistency, completeness and categoricity. Carnap later circulated this material to various people including Gödel.

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