ZusammenfassungDie beiden Texte, die hier erstmalig abgedruckt werden, stammen aus Rudolf Carnaps... more ZusammenfassungDie beiden Texte, die hier erstmalig abgedruckt werden, stammen aus Rudolf Carnaps Studien- und Kriegsjahren, die bis jetzt wenig erforscht worden sind. Lediglich über seine politische Entwicklung gegen Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs, im Jahre 1918, sind wir inzwischen etwas weniger im Dunklen. Seine erste Veröffentlichung, eine Besprechung zweier Bücher über mögliche Formen eines Staaten- beziehungsweise Völkerbundes, erscheint demnächst im ersten Band der Carnap Gesamtausgabe. Eine weitere, viel umfassendere „politische Stellungnahme“, wie er sie nannte, die in derselben Zeitschrift am Vorabend der Revolution 1918 erscheinen sollte, um dann aber von den sich überstürzenden Ereignissen überholt zu werden, nämlich der Aufsatz „Deutschlands Niederlage: Sinnloses Schicksal oder Schuld?“, erscheint ebenfalls im vorliegenden Band. Meike Werner hat den Hintergrund dieser ganzen Phase in Carnaps Entwicklung nun beleuchtet, durch ihre Untersuchung zu Carnaps eigenen Politischen ...
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 2019
Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice... more Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice may not actually go back to Neurath’s response to Carnap’s embrace of Tarskian semantics, there is a continuity of motivation and rhetoric. However, based on a reading of the later Neurath-Carnap correspondence reproduced in this volume, it would appear that the apparent dispute between them over semantics really was largely terminological, with certain differences of emphasis amplified by personality differences and the long interruption of personal contact due to the war. Their conceptions of a language of science can be reconciled. Carnap was neither a representationalist nor an anti-representationalist nor an inferentialist (though it may appear that he can legitimately be portrayed as any of these), since ultimately to embrace one of these positions is to endorse an “order of explanation” or ontological primacy, and Carnap rejected ontology.
ZusammenfassungCarnaps Nonkognitivismus hatte seinen Ursprung nicht bei Kant, wie meist geglaubt ... more ZusammenfassungCarnaps Nonkognitivismus hatte seinen Ursprung nicht bei Kant, wie meist geglaubt wird, sondern im radikalen Anti-Theologismus des protestantischen Publizisten und Predigers Johannes Müller. Dies wird anhand eines Vortragsmanuskripts aus der Zeit vor dem Krieg (ca. 1911) gezeigt, als Carnap in Freiburg studierte und dort auch an der Gründung einer Freischar mitarbeitete. Die radikale Trennung von „Glaubensätzen“ (die höchste Werte zum Ausdruck bringen) und „Wissenssätzen“ (die – wie sich Carnap später ausdrücken würde – „kognitives“ Wissen formulieren) setzt sich auch, wie gezeigt wird, in anderen frühen Zeugnissen aus der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit fort. Aber irgendwann während dem Krieg wurde die religiöse Basis dieser scharfen begrifflichen Trennung durch die Kantische Trennung zwischen praktischer und theoretischer Vernunft ersetzt. Carnap behielt die scharfe Trennung bei, aber ersetzte die Basis für die Trennung.
In late 1924, Carnap radically changed the Aufbau framework. Up to then, the logical construction... more In late 1924, Carnap radically changed the Aufbau framework. Up to then, the logical construction of “realities” or “secondary worlds” by quasi-analysis had proceeded on the basis of a fixed, phenomenologically articulated “primary world.” This distinction disappears in 1924, and logical construction is now applied directly to the basis itself, following the published book’s Russellian motto, “Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.” This paper first reviews the available documentary evidence for this radical change, but finds only hints, which are then placed in the larger context of Carnap’s development during this period.
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 2019
Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice... more Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice may not actually go back to Neurath’s response to Carnap’s embrace of Tarskian semantics, there is a continuity of motivation and rhetoric. However, based on a reading of the later Neurath-Carnap correspondence reproduced in this volume, it would appear that the apparent dispute between them over semantics really was largely terminological, with certain differences of emphasis amplified by personality differences and the long interruption of personal contact due to the war. Their conceptions of a language of science can be reconciled. Carnap was neither a representationalist nor an anti-representationalist nor an inferentialist (though it may appear that he can legitimately be portrayed as any of these), since ultimately to embrace one of these positions is to endorse an “order of explanation” or ontological primacy, and Carnap rejected ontology.
It is generally thought that Carnap’s principle of tolerance cannot be integrated into a coherent... more It is generally thought that Carnap’s principle of tolerance cannot be integrated into a coherent overall conception of rationality. The doubts come from many sides, of which two are singled out. This paper argues (and documents) that both are wrong, and that Carnapian rationality is a viable and perhaps quite interesting program for further development.
ORIGINS The young Carnap is not easy to classify. He was neither really a scientist nor a proper ... more ORIGINS The young Carnap is not easy to classify. He was neither really a scientist nor a proper philosopher. Among scientists he felt temperamentally at home, but he regretted the slovenliness of the enterprise. The officers at headquarters, he thought, needed to bring some order to operations on the front. Unfortunately these “officers” – the neo-Kantian philosophers whose lectures he attended in Jena and Freiburg before the First World War – seemed too unsure of the terrain to guide the scientific sappers in their spadework of intellectual trench warfare. But Carnap did not reject the neo-Kantian tradition he grew up in. He assimilated a good deal of it. The impulse for the revival of Kant in mid-nineteenth-century Germany had originally come from the natural sciences rather than philosophy, particularly from the great physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz. He and the philosophers who followed his lead had wanted to complete the job of eliminating metaphysics that Kant, in their view, had left unfinished. Helmholtz’s physiology of perception, they thought, could render the transcendental aesthetic metaphysically harmless. Though they held that the subjective feelings of spatiality and temporality are built into our perceptual system, just as Kant had argued, this did not mean that the geometry governing the perceived world was put there by human perception. We have no idea, Helmholtz said, whether physical space is Euclidean or non-Euclidean; this is an empirical question like any other, to be settled by going out and looking. So much, Helmholtz had thought, for Kant’s best example of supposedly synthetic a priori knowledge.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2009
Montinari edition has suggested that, since Stanford has exclusive copyright of English translati... more Montinari edition has suggested that, since Stanford has exclusive copyright of English translation of the KSA, recent Cambridge translations (including this one) are in violation of Stanford’s copyright, and even called, in the case of a selection of Nachlass material, for the volume to be withdrawn. Whatever the legal rights and wrongs, the existing variety of translations is surely a strength for Nietzsche scholars and interpreters. It is hard to think of a philosopher whose work has undergone such a fraught editorial process, and with such damaging consequences, as is the case – thanks, above all, to his notorious sister – with Nietzsche; it would be a pity if the fruits of the textual scholarship that blossomed in the Kritische Gesamtwerkausgabe and the KSA were not spread as widely as possible: ‘The figs fall from the trees, they are good and sweet; and as they fall, their red skin ruptures. I am a north wind to ripe figs. / Thus, like figs, these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their juice and their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around and pure sky and afternoon’ (‘On the Blessed Isles’; 65).
Tarski’s definition of truth had a major impact on analytic philosophy. It unquestionably had a m... more Tarski’s definition of truth had a major impact on analytic philosophy. It unquestionably had a major impact on Carnap. It helped motivate his shift, in the mid-1930’s, from pure syntax to the incorporation of semantics (and then pragmatics) into his overall view of scientific language. But it is sometimes said (e.g. by Coffa1) that this change of Carnap’s, from pure syntax to a broader view including semantics, involved the abandonment of a coherence theory of truth, and the acceptance of a correspondence theory. Along with this comes the accusation — levelled, for instance, by Russell2 — that the supposed coherence theory of the syntax phase led Carnap to give up an empiricist criterion of meaning.
Many historians reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies.This... more Many historians reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies.This article argues that no sharp distinction between qualitative and quantitative concepts can be drawn, as almost any concept used to describe a past society is implicitly quantitative. Many recent advances in understanding have been achieved by deriving quantitative evidence from qualitative evidence, using the two dialectically, and indexing them against other quantitative findings from the same population. We show that this triangulation method can be extended to many apparently qualitative sources. Despite its successes, the potential of turning qualitative into quantitative evidence has only just begun to be exploited.
When Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, he and many of his readers t... more When Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, he and many of his readers thought that introducing a historical dimension into the study of scientific theories and their languages was a decisive break with logical empiricism. But it has now been shown that Carnap himself — the editor of the series in which Kuhn’s book was published — welcomed it unreservedly, and that he had good reason to.1 Kuhn’s position, it is now widely agreed, was to some degree compatible with Carnap’s later view, which had developed considerably since the Vienna Circle doctrines of the 1920s.2 But why, then, have history and philosophy of science since Kuhn largely rejected logical empiricism? Evidently, Kuhn added more than just a historical dimension; his conception of knowledge was also quite different from Carnap’s (Section 1 below). Could Carnap have accommodated a historical dimension that fit better? This chapter argues that Carnap’s framework (Section 2) allows a role for the hi...
This Technical Report is brought to you for free and open access by the Dietrich College of Human... more This Technical Report is brought to you for free and open access by the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Research Showcase. Ithas been accepted for inclusion in Department of Philosophy by an authorized administrator of Research Showcase. For more information, pleasecontactresearch-showcase@andrew.cmu.edu.
ZusammenfassungDie beiden Texte, die hier erstmalig abgedruckt werden, stammen aus Rudolf Carnaps... more ZusammenfassungDie beiden Texte, die hier erstmalig abgedruckt werden, stammen aus Rudolf Carnaps Studien- und Kriegsjahren, die bis jetzt wenig erforscht worden sind. Lediglich über seine politische Entwicklung gegen Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs, im Jahre 1918, sind wir inzwischen etwas weniger im Dunklen. Seine erste Veröffentlichung, eine Besprechung zweier Bücher über mögliche Formen eines Staaten- beziehungsweise Völkerbundes, erscheint demnächst im ersten Band der Carnap Gesamtausgabe. Eine weitere, viel umfassendere „politische Stellungnahme“, wie er sie nannte, die in derselben Zeitschrift am Vorabend der Revolution 1918 erscheinen sollte, um dann aber von den sich überstürzenden Ereignissen überholt zu werden, nämlich der Aufsatz „Deutschlands Niederlage: Sinnloses Schicksal oder Schuld?“, erscheint ebenfalls im vorliegenden Band. Meike Werner hat den Hintergrund dieser ganzen Phase in Carnaps Entwicklung nun beleuchtet, durch ihre Untersuchung zu Carnaps eigenen Politischen ...
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 2019
Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice... more Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice may not actually go back to Neurath’s response to Carnap’s embrace of Tarskian semantics, there is a continuity of motivation and rhetoric. However, based on a reading of the later Neurath-Carnap correspondence reproduced in this volume, it would appear that the apparent dispute between them over semantics really was largely terminological, with certain differences of emphasis amplified by personality differences and the long interruption of personal contact due to the war. Their conceptions of a language of science can be reconciled. Carnap was neither a representationalist nor an anti-representationalist nor an inferentialist (though it may appear that he can legitimately be portrayed as any of these), since ultimately to embrace one of these positions is to endorse an “order of explanation” or ontological primacy, and Carnap rejected ontology.
ZusammenfassungCarnaps Nonkognitivismus hatte seinen Ursprung nicht bei Kant, wie meist geglaubt ... more ZusammenfassungCarnaps Nonkognitivismus hatte seinen Ursprung nicht bei Kant, wie meist geglaubt wird, sondern im radikalen Anti-Theologismus des protestantischen Publizisten und Predigers Johannes Müller. Dies wird anhand eines Vortragsmanuskripts aus der Zeit vor dem Krieg (ca. 1911) gezeigt, als Carnap in Freiburg studierte und dort auch an der Gründung einer Freischar mitarbeitete. Die radikale Trennung von „Glaubensätzen“ (die höchste Werte zum Ausdruck bringen) und „Wissenssätzen“ (die – wie sich Carnap später ausdrücken würde – „kognitives“ Wissen formulieren) setzt sich auch, wie gezeigt wird, in anderen frühen Zeugnissen aus der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit fort. Aber irgendwann während dem Krieg wurde die religiöse Basis dieser scharfen begrifflichen Trennung durch die Kantische Trennung zwischen praktischer und theoretischer Vernunft ersetzt. Carnap behielt die scharfe Trennung bei, aber ersetzte die Basis für die Trennung.
In late 1924, Carnap radically changed the Aufbau framework. Up to then, the logical construction... more In late 1924, Carnap radically changed the Aufbau framework. Up to then, the logical construction of “realities” or “secondary worlds” by quasi-analysis had proceeded on the basis of a fixed, phenomenologically articulated “primary world.” This distinction disappears in 1924, and logical construction is now applied directly to the basis itself, following the published book’s Russellian motto, “Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.” This paper first reviews the available documentary evidence for this radical change, but finds only hints, which are then placed in the larger context of Carnap’s development during this period.
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 2019
Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice... more Carnap is still often portrayed as a “representationalist.” While the genealogy of this prejudice may not actually go back to Neurath’s response to Carnap’s embrace of Tarskian semantics, there is a continuity of motivation and rhetoric. However, based on a reading of the later Neurath-Carnap correspondence reproduced in this volume, it would appear that the apparent dispute between them over semantics really was largely terminological, with certain differences of emphasis amplified by personality differences and the long interruption of personal contact due to the war. Their conceptions of a language of science can be reconciled. Carnap was neither a representationalist nor an anti-representationalist nor an inferentialist (though it may appear that he can legitimately be portrayed as any of these), since ultimately to embrace one of these positions is to endorse an “order of explanation” or ontological primacy, and Carnap rejected ontology.
It is generally thought that Carnap’s principle of tolerance cannot be integrated into a coherent... more It is generally thought that Carnap’s principle of tolerance cannot be integrated into a coherent overall conception of rationality. The doubts come from many sides, of which two are singled out. This paper argues (and documents) that both are wrong, and that Carnapian rationality is a viable and perhaps quite interesting program for further development.
ORIGINS The young Carnap is not easy to classify. He was neither really a scientist nor a proper ... more ORIGINS The young Carnap is not easy to classify. He was neither really a scientist nor a proper philosopher. Among scientists he felt temperamentally at home, but he regretted the slovenliness of the enterprise. The officers at headquarters, he thought, needed to bring some order to operations on the front. Unfortunately these “officers” – the neo-Kantian philosophers whose lectures he attended in Jena and Freiburg before the First World War – seemed too unsure of the terrain to guide the scientific sappers in their spadework of intellectual trench warfare. But Carnap did not reject the neo-Kantian tradition he grew up in. He assimilated a good deal of it. The impulse for the revival of Kant in mid-nineteenth-century Germany had originally come from the natural sciences rather than philosophy, particularly from the great physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz. He and the philosophers who followed his lead had wanted to complete the job of eliminating metaphysics that Kant, in their view, had left unfinished. Helmholtz’s physiology of perception, they thought, could render the transcendental aesthetic metaphysically harmless. Though they held that the subjective feelings of spatiality and temporality are built into our perceptual system, just as Kant had argued, this did not mean that the geometry governing the perceived world was put there by human perception. We have no idea, Helmholtz said, whether physical space is Euclidean or non-Euclidean; this is an empirical question like any other, to be settled by going out and looking. So much, Helmholtz had thought, for Kant’s best example of supposedly synthetic a priori knowledge.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2009
Montinari edition has suggested that, since Stanford has exclusive copyright of English translati... more Montinari edition has suggested that, since Stanford has exclusive copyright of English translation of the KSA, recent Cambridge translations (including this one) are in violation of Stanford’s copyright, and even called, in the case of a selection of Nachlass material, for the volume to be withdrawn. Whatever the legal rights and wrongs, the existing variety of translations is surely a strength for Nietzsche scholars and interpreters. It is hard to think of a philosopher whose work has undergone such a fraught editorial process, and with such damaging consequences, as is the case – thanks, above all, to his notorious sister – with Nietzsche; it would be a pity if the fruits of the textual scholarship that blossomed in the Kritische Gesamtwerkausgabe and the KSA were not spread as widely as possible: ‘The figs fall from the trees, they are good and sweet; and as they fall, their red skin ruptures. I am a north wind to ripe figs. / Thus, like figs, these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their juice and their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around and pure sky and afternoon’ (‘On the Blessed Isles’; 65).
Tarski’s definition of truth had a major impact on analytic philosophy. It unquestionably had a m... more Tarski’s definition of truth had a major impact on analytic philosophy. It unquestionably had a major impact on Carnap. It helped motivate his shift, in the mid-1930’s, from pure syntax to the incorporation of semantics (and then pragmatics) into his overall view of scientific language. But it is sometimes said (e.g. by Coffa1) that this change of Carnap’s, from pure syntax to a broader view including semantics, involved the abandonment of a coherence theory of truth, and the acceptance of a correspondence theory. Along with this comes the accusation — levelled, for instance, by Russell2 — that the supposed coherence theory of the syntax phase led Carnap to give up an empiricist criterion of meaning.
Many historians reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies.This... more Many historians reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies.This article argues that no sharp distinction between qualitative and quantitative concepts can be drawn, as almost any concept used to describe a past society is implicitly quantitative. Many recent advances in understanding have been achieved by deriving quantitative evidence from qualitative evidence, using the two dialectically, and indexing them against other quantitative findings from the same population. We show that this triangulation method can be extended to many apparently qualitative sources. Despite its successes, the potential of turning qualitative into quantitative evidence has only just begun to be exploited.
When Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, he and many of his readers t... more When Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, he and many of his readers thought that introducing a historical dimension into the study of scientific theories and their languages was a decisive break with logical empiricism. But it has now been shown that Carnap himself — the editor of the series in which Kuhn’s book was published — welcomed it unreservedly, and that he had good reason to.1 Kuhn’s position, it is now widely agreed, was to some degree compatible with Carnap’s later view, which had developed considerably since the Vienna Circle doctrines of the 1920s.2 But why, then, have history and philosophy of science since Kuhn largely rejected logical empiricism? Evidently, Kuhn added more than just a historical dimension; his conception of knowledge was also quite different from Carnap’s (Section 1 below). Could Carnap have accommodated a historical dimension that fit better? This chapter argues that Carnap’s framework (Section 2) allows a role for the hi...
This Technical Report is brought to you for free and open access by the Dietrich College of Human... more This Technical Report is brought to you for free and open access by the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Research Showcase. Ithas been accepted for inclusion in Department of Philosophy by an authorized administrator of Research Showcase. For more information, pleasecontactresearch-showcase@andrew.cmu.edu.
I'm putting this on here because NDPR somehow failed to index it, so it can't actually be found t... more I'm putting this on here because NDPR somehow failed to index it, so it can't actually be found there under title, author, or reviewer by using their search function.
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