Abstract
This chapter outlines Carl Hempel’s philosophical development in broad perspective. One little-appreciated fact that becomes clear in our discussion is that the Vienna Circle had less influence on Hempel than did the Berlin Group. Tracing this influence involves presenting seminal doctrines of Hempel’s masters and of his academic associates. The ultimate aim here is to locate Hempel’s place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy of science.
For most academics, even most philosophers, the individual who best personified logical empiricism in North America was neither Carnap nor Reichenbach, but Carl Hempel. … Hempel’s early papers, “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” (1945) and “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” (1948, with Paul Oppenheim), effectively defined what by 1960 were arguably the two most active areas of research in North American philosophy of science.
(Giere 1996, pp. 339–340)
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- 1.
On the “pragmatism” of Hempel’s later position see Wolters (2003).
- 2.
Since Reichenbach left Germany for Turkey in the summer of 1933, formally, Wolfgang Köhler, not Reichenbach, was the supervisor of Carl Hempel’s dissertation.
- 3.
Carl Hempel’s letter to Hans Reichenbach of 19.03.1934 [HR 013-46-30].
- 4.
Cf. Chapter One, § 1.3.
- 5.
This story refers to Hempel’s letter to his friend, written in November 1929, and is thus reliable.
- 6.
David Hilbert’s assistent Paul Bernays was sometime a member of the Leonard Nelson’s “Jakob Friedrich Fries Society” in Göttingen (active between 1913 and 1921). In the mid-1930s Heinrich Scholtz set up what was later called the “Münster Group” of exact philosophy.
- 7.
This point betrays Oppenheim’s connection with another person close to the ideas of the Berlin Group—Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943). Oppenheimer was the first professor of sociology in Germany and a close friend of Leonard Nelson: in the mid-twenties Oppenheimer invited Nelson’s former doctoral student Julius Kraft to become his assistant. (Kraft was also close friend of Karl Popper with whom he launched in 1957 the journal Ratio o.s. Cf. Popper 1962) Among Oppenheimer’s students were Theodor Adorno and Ludwig Eckhart (the “father” of the West-German Wirtschaftswunder after World War Two). Interestingly enough, Oppenheimer spoke about “united science [Einheitswissenschaft]” much before either the Berlin Group or the Vienna Circle did so. (Cf. Oppenheimer 1922, pp. xiv f., 10 f) This point was noted in Neurath 1932, p. 271, with reference to Kurt Lewin as a source of information.
- 8.
- 9.
In the already mentioned paper of Kurt Grelling, “Philosophy of the Exact Sciences: Its Present Status in Germany,” he presented Reichenbach and Lewin as two alternative philosophers of exact science. Cf. Grelling (1928), p. 98.
- 10.
- 11.
Cf. with the theory of rigid designators of Hilary Putnam (one of Reichenbach’s students at the University of California at Berkeley) and Saul Kripke.
- 12.
This difference is underlined in Grelling (1928), p. 98.
- 13.
Hempel himself remembers that he first met Oppenheim immediately after the former returned from Vienna, i.e. in Spring 1930, while Oppenheim dated this event in 1933 (Oppenheim 1969, p. 1).
- 14.
This work resulted in Oppenheim and Rescher (1955).
- 15.
In this kind of selfless pursuit of truth, Carnap is reminiscent of Bertrand Russell and strongly opposed Husserl and Wittgenstein who insisted that the truth they discovered are “eternal” and thus cannot be corrected or supplemented by their critics. Cf. Milkov (2012).
- 16.
Email communication of Olaf Helmer to the author from July 27, 2009.
- 17.
In support of this claim we would like to note that between 1926 and 1935 Carnap taught philosophy at the University of Vienna and then at the University of Prague. When he started to teach at the University of Chicago, however, he invited (in 1937) Reichenbach’s students Hempel and Helmer, and not some of his own students, to become his assistants. This also explains why Hempel and Helmer so easily started to work together with Carnap.
- 18.
Cf. Diskussion über Wahrscheinlichkeit, Erkenntnis 1 (1930): 260–287.
- 19.
- 20.
As already seen, Carnap and Hempel practiced it from the beginning of the 1940s onward.
- 21.
On Ernan McMullin’s terms “external” and “internal” philosophy of science see Chapter One, § 1.9.
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Appendix
Appendix
Carl Hempel, Spring 1958, at the University of Yale (by Veli Valpola)
The editors and publishes would like to thank the following for permission to use photographs: Fred Stein Archive, Stanfordville, NY (for 2); Fotoagentur Ullstein Bild, Berlin (for 3); Nicholas Rescher (for 1 and 5); Karin Gimple-Grelling, Zürich (for 4); The Special Collections Department, University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh (for 6).
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Milkov, N. (2013). Carl Hempel: Whose Philosopher?. In: Milkov, N., Peckhaus, V. (eds) The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 273. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5485-0_14
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