Jørgen Jørgensen and Logical Positivism

“I believe that, of all of us, he alone does his worst as a critic of our era.” Otto Neurath characterised the new co-editor of the series Einheitswissenschaft, the Danish philosopher Jørgen Jørgensen (1894–1969),¹ professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen (1926–1964) with these words in a letter to Rudolf Carnap in November 1934.² At the time, Jørgensen was already a close acquaintance of both Neurath and Carnap. They met in 1930 at the Seventh International Congress of Philosophy in Oxford, at which Moritz Schlick had spoken of “The Future of Philosophy”,³ and Jørgensen himself gave a lecture on “The Principal Metaphysical Implications of Recent Physical Theories and Points of View”.