A comprehensive, systematic, and historical collection of essays on Rudolf Carnap's philosophy and legacy, written by leading international experts. This volume provides a redressing of Carnap's place in the history of analytic philosophy, through his approach to metaphysics, values, politics, epistemology and philosophy of science.

This volume critically examines the work of three eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, engaging with and developing their answers to key methodological questions.

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and Otto Neurath (1882-1945) had a decisive influence on the development of the scientific world view of logical empiricism. Their relationship was marked by mutual intellectual stimulation, close collaboration, and personal friendship, but also by controversies that were as heated as they were rarely fought out in public. Carnap and Neurath were, in the words of Olga Hahn-Neurath, "like-minded opponents". The essays in this volume deal with these key thinkers of logical empiricism from different perspectives, shedding light on the complex development of one of the most influential philosophical currents of the twentieth century in the midst of dark times.

The book consists of a series of chapters on Carnap's ideal of explication as an alternative to the naturalistic conceptions of science, setting it in its historical context, discussing specific cases of explications, and enriching the on-going debate on conceptual engineering and naturalism in analytic philosophy.

This book reassesses Carnap and Quine by presenting them as sharing philosophical motivations despite their notable differences.

This volume contains Carnap's Studies in Semantics, a series of three interlocking books: Introduction to Semantics (1942), Formalization of Logic (1942), and Meaning and Necessity (1947). They were extremely influential in their time, especially the third, and shaped the direction of analytic philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. They constitute the background to a number of celebrated controversies of that period, especially those between Carnap and Quine. Most of the philosophical debates today in philosophical logic and the philosophy of language ultimately had their origins here. This new edition situates these works in their context, both within Carnap's philosophical development and within the philosophical debates they responded to and influenced. The editors' introduction explains how Carnap arrived at the project of semantics in the 1930s and how it developed into these three successive publications, how the three books fit together, and how the project developed and changed in the course of the 1940s. It also describes the reception of the books as they appeared, as well as Carnap's response. The editorial and textual notes give variant readings, Carnap's own marginal notes on these texts in his personal copies, and elucidatory commentary where Carnap's terminology or notation are no longer familiar. This will be an indispensable volume for anyone interested in the origins and preoccupations of present-day analytic philosophy, especially philosophical logic and philosophy of language.

A reconstruction of the lines of argument used by Carnap, Tarski, and Quine, highlighting their historical significance and contemporary relevance based on Carnap's own notes from his conversations of the time.During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard, holding regular private meetings, with Carnap, Tarski, and Quine. 'Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard' allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall for their conversations. Carnap took detailed notes during his year at Harvard. This book includes both a German transcription of these shorthand notes and an English translation in the appendix section. Carnap's notes cover a wide range of topics, but surprisingly, the most prominent question is: If the number of physical items in the universe is finite, what form should scientific discourse take? This question is closely connected to anabiding philosophical problem: What is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the material realm? Carnap, Tarski, and Quine's attempts to answer this question involve issues central to philosophy today.This book focuses on three such issues: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. In short, the book reconstructs the lines of argument represented in these Harvard discussions, discusses their historical significance (especially Quine's break from Carnap),and relates them when possible to contemporary treatments of these issues.

It is not inacurate to say that from 1928 to 1936 Carnap was a member of the Vienna Circle, even though during this period he was not always present in Vienna. During this years, which spanned roughly the period from the Aufbauto Testability and Meaning, he worked or at least discussed frequently with the members of the group.However, traditionally it has been difficult to form a proper view of the development of Carnap's ideas throughout this period, mainly because of three errors which have persisted in the commonly accepted historical interpretation of Carnap and the Vienna Circle: emphasis on the Circle as a unit rather than a collective of individuals; insistence on verificationism as the defining characteristic of Logical Positivism; and the systematic abstraction of the work of the Circle from its historical context. As against this historically distorted image, this book argues for an alternative reading, evaluating the different influences on Carnap of Schlick, Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper, and making sense of Carnap's evolution from physicalism to phenomenalism and the syntactic point of view.

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Germany and later a US citizen, he was a founder of the philosophical movement known as Logical Empiricism. He was strongly influenced by a number of different philosophical traditions (including the legacies of both Kant and Husserl), and also by the German Youth Movement, the First World War (in which he was wounded and decorated), and radical socialism. This book places his central ideas in a broad cultural, political and intellectual context, showing how he synthesised many different currents of thought to achieve a philosophical perspective that remains strikingly relevant in the twenty-first century. Its rich account of a philosopher's response to his times will appeal to all who are interested in the development of philosophy in the twentieth century.