Abstract
Rudolf Carnap was born in 1891 in Ronsdorf near Barmen in Northwest Germany. He was the 14th and last child of Johann Sebulon Carnap (1826–1898). The father was a self-made man in the weaving business who became wealthy late in life, which after the death of his first two wives allowed him to marry (1887) into a well-educated familyl which included a prominent educator and archaeologist.2 After his death, Anna née Dörpfeld, his third wife, a poet, teacher, and writer, tutored young Rudolf for three years. In Gymnasium his favorite subjects seem to have been Latin and mathematics.3 He studied at the universities of Jena and Freiburg from 1910 to 1914.4 He remembered that Bruno Bauch at Jena had taught him Kant’s philosophy and Hermann Nohl had discussed Hegel’s views, but it was Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) who impresed him most.5 He told Carnap about a new kind of formal logic which “could serve for the construction of the whole of mathematics”. 6
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References
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See Klaus Göbel, “Die Wuppertaler Familie Carnap”, Romerike Berge. Zeitschrift Für Heimatpflege,20 (1970–71) 9–14. See also “Johann Sebulon Carnap 1826–1898, Ibid. 21 (1971) 112–121.
The educator was Friedrich Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1824–1893) whose complete works were published in 1913, and the prominent archaeologist who discovered much about Ancient Greece, particularly Athens, was Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853–1940).
Rudolf Carnap, “Carnap’s Intellectual Autobiography” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap,edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Open Court: La Salle, 1991 (1963), p. 3.
Ibid., pp. 3–7.
Ibid., pp. 4–6 and 11–13.
Ibid., p. 5.
See 19th century physics textbooks starting with Adolphe Ganot, Cours de physique purement expérimentale, ’a l’usage des personnes étrangères aux connaisances mathématiques… [published by the author himself], Paris, 1859. Ganot’s physics textbooks were translated into the languages of many countries including England, Australia, The Netherlands, The United States, India, Japan, and Russia and seem to have been the most popular and widely used introductory textbooks in physics until the end of the century and in some coutries well beyond.
Ernst Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures,Open Court: La Salle, 1943 (1895), pp. 241–242.
Carnap 1991, op. cit., p. 9.
Carnap 1956, op. cit., p. 43
Ludwig Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, edited by B. McGuinness, Reidel: Dordrecht, 1974, p. 275.
Like many mathematicians and physicists, Carnap seems to have rejected the notion of efficient causes as powers or forces. This is understandable given the imprecise number of variables as relevant causal factors which has to be taken into account in order to set up constant or necessary relations between them, but given the indispensable role of efficient causes in non-idealized science and in practical life, such an attitude seems to be very short-sighted. It is too informative a notion to ignore or treat as “unscientific”.
Epistemological phenomenalism is the position that we can only know sensations. Ontological phenomenalism is the view that only sensations are real. Mach supported both positions. See his book Analysis of Sensations,Dover: New York, 1959, p. 12. But on page 363 in the same book Mach also accepts the reality of relations, a concession which Carnap as we shall see will eagerly accept and develop further.
For a discussion of “economy of thought” see J. Blackmore, Ernst Mach,University of California Press: Berkeley, 1972, pp. 169–174.
The allegation was that phenomenalism was neutral between realism and idealism, but epistemologically, phenomenalism has been considered part of idealism ever since Bishop Berkeley identified the physical world with sensations which he called “ideas”.
Rudolf Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Weltkreis: Berlin-Schlachtensee, 1928.
Rudolf Carnap, Der Raum. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre. Inaugural Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde… Universität Jena, 1921. 87 pages. [This work was published the following year in Kant-Studien as Ergänzungshefte # 56.]
Rudolf Carnap, “Drei Dimensionalität des Raumes und Kausalittät: Eine Untersuchung über den logischen Zusamenhang zweier Fiktionen” in Annalen der Philosophie und philosophischen Kritik (Leipzig), 4 (1924) Heft 3, pp. [105]-130.
Edmund Runggaldier, Carnap’s Early Conventionalism - An Inquiry into the Historical Background of the Vienna Circle, Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1984.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid. p. 19.
Ibid. p. 18.
Hans Reiner Sepp Edmund Husserl und die phänomenologische BewegungVerlag Karl Alber: Freiburg/München, 1988, p. 425.
Hugo Dingier, Die Grundgedanken der Machschen Philosophie, Leipzig, 1924. See also Gereon Wolters, “Früher Konventionalismus. Der Carnap-Dingler Briefwechsel”, in Peter Janich (ed.), Methodische Philosophie. Beiträge zum Begründungsproblem der exakten Wissenschaften in Auseinandersetzung mit Hugo Dingier, Mannheim, 1984, pp. 60–76.
Rudolf Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928), 2nd edition, Felix Meiner Verlag: Hamburg, 1961.
Kantstudien,28 (1923) 90–107.
Runggaldier 1984, op. cit., p. 30.
Henri Poincaré, Science and Method,New York, 1958, pp. 15–24.
Philipp Frank, “Das Kausalgesetz und Erfahrung”, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, Volume 6, 1907. See also his book: Das Kausalgesetz und seine Grenzen, Julius Springer Verlag, Wien, 1932. Many years ago, Gerald Holton once mentioned to this author that Philipp Frank’s Nachlass was located in a Boston bank, but neither this author nor anyone elese has apparently seen fit to follow up this lead.
See Hans Hahn, “Superfluous Entities or Occam’s Razor [1930]”, in Hans Hahn - Empiricism, Logic, and Mathematics, edited by Brian McGuinness, Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1980. While Hahn who died in 1934 seems at least from his blunt philosophical writings to have been severe and humorless in his personality, his wife Lili (or Lily), who was still alive in 1968 when interviewed by this writer, had also studied mathematics and subsequently would become well-known in Vienna for her humor and ability to remember anecdotes about Viennese celebrities, especially her professor in physics, Ludwig Boltzmann. Several of her stories can be found in Blackmore’s 1.995 books on Boltzmann. For more recent material by and about Boltzmann see: John Blackmore (ed.) “Ludwig Boltzmann - Troubled Genius as Philosopher ”, Synthese, 119 (1999) nos. 1–2, pp. 1–232.
Runggalder 1984, op. cit., p. 38. By “causality” (“Kausalität”) Carnap and Ruggaldier mean “law-determined regularity” not cause and effect activity as in normal English. The usual word for “cause” in German is “Ursache”.
Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, Berlin, 1911. (The first two parts of the book were apparently written from 1876 to 1878. Vaihinger alleges that illness made it difficult to finish the book earlier. Mach corresponded with Vaihinger. Iie also seems to have given quite diverse opinions about “As If philosophy”. )
Franco Volpi and Julian Nida-Rümelin (eds.), Lexikon der Philosophischen Werke, Alfred Kröner Verlag: Stuttgart, 1988, pp. 549–550. (Carnap lists Vaihinger’s book [8th edition, 1922] in his bibliography to Der logische Aufbau der Welt in 1928, but it is not clear if or how much he may have been influenced by it.)
W.L. Reese in Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, Humanities Press: New Jersey, 1980, pp. 602–603 maintains that Vaihinger and Schmidt founded the journal Annalen der Philosophie in 1919 in order to help spread Vaihinger’s As If philosophy.
Edmund Runggaldier, “The Secondary World as Fiction, and the Failure of its reduction to the primary World”, Carnap’s Early Conventionalism, Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1984, pp. 38–43.
Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World [1928] and Pseudo Problems in Philosophy [1928], translated by Rolf A. George, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969, p. vii.
Rudolf Carnap, “The Development of my Thinking”, in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Open Court: La Salle, 1991, p. 16.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 19.
Runggaldier 1984, op. cit., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 71.
Carnap 1969, op. cit., p. viii.
Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy,Translated by Rolf A. George, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969 (1967), pp. 281287.
Edwin Arthur Burtt, “The Subjectivity of Secondary Qualities”, in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science,A Doubleday Anchor Book: Garden City, 1954 (1924), pp. 83–90. This selection also includes a translation of Galileo’s own words from The Assayer (1624) as found in Opere IV,pp. 335–336.
The Metaphysics of Newton“, ibid., pp. 207–302.
Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World…, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969, p. 281.
Arthur Lovejoy was perhaps the deepest American epistemologist. Unfortunately, his major work, The Rrevolt Against Dualism (1930), is not easy to read.
Like Rudolf Carnap, Burtt opposed representism, and also like Carnap he used the term “metaphysics” to describe it, but first, the English term was not as opprobrious as in German at that time, and second, having studied the history of science he was well aware that most of the main contributors to the Scientific Revolution were representists about the external physical world as were many or most later physicists, something which Rudolf Carnap seems not to have realized, or at least did not admit. A broad education is important for a philosopher and Carnap seems to have been lightly read in works outside of formal and systematic disciplines. His understanding of history of science seems to have been especially weak
Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics,Open Court, La Salle, 1960, pp. 151–190. Mach also seems to criticize Galileo for his interest in the atomic theory as if that were merely a relic of “ancient and mediaeval influences”. p. 187.
Carnap 1969, op. cit., p. 282.
Not to be confused with the mathematician of the same name and era. The philosopher Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856) distinguished between knowledge about what is presented and reasonable probability or belief about what is represented. Hamilton’s value here is evidence that even presentists are capable of employing reasonably inclusive and fair terminology and definitions. (James Ferrier is normally thought to have introduced the term “Epistemology” into English during the 1850’s and in time it replaced Hamilton’s earlier expression “gnosiology”.)
The term was apparently introduced by Hamilton in 1836–37 in a lecture which was later published in Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic edited by H.L. Mansel and John Veitch, volume I, Edinburgh and Boston, 1859, pp. vii and 122.
The word “presentative” has a long history but seems to have first made its debut as a philosophical term in 1842 with the sense of immediate or intuitive and was included in The Works of Thomas Reid,two volumes, which I-Iamilton edited, and which first came out in Edinburgh in 1846, p. 804. It was used later by Herbert Spencer.
Carnap 1969, op. cit., pp. 284–285.
Ibid., p. 282–284.
Ledger Wood, “Dualistic or Representative Realism” in A History of Philosophical Systems, edited by V. Ferm, The Philosophical Library, New York, 1950, pp. 525–527.
bid. See also J.M. Baldwin (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology,Volume II, Mac- millan: New York, 1925, p. 464: “Hamilton (Lectures on Metaphysics) classifies theories of knowledge as immediate and representative.”
Ibid (Wood).
Carnap 1969, op. cit., p. 282.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 286.
Ibid., pp. 282–284.
Ibid., p. 281.
Ibid., p. 288.
Ibid., pp. 282–284.
Ibid., pp. 284–287.
Perhaps the most widely read book on history of science during the last half of the 20th century has been James F. Mason’s work A History of the Sciences,Collier Books: New York. (The editor’s copy went through nine printings between 1962 and 1975 alone.) See pp. 500–502. There have also been many translations into other languages.
Ibid. This is certainly Mason’s opinion.
Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Open Court, La Salle, 1991, pp. 1018–1056.
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Blackmore, J., Itagaki, R., Tanaka, S. (2001). Carnap’s Machist “Phase”. In: Blackmore, J., Itagaki, R., Tanaka, S. (eds) Ernst Mach’s Vienna 1895–1930. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 218. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9690-9_8
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