Background
Wedberg, Anders Erik Otto was born on March 30, 1913 in Stockholm.
Historian of philosophy Analytical philsopher
Wedberg, Anders Erik Otto was born on March 30, 1913 in Stockholm.
Universities of Uppsala and Stockholm.
1949-1976, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Stockholm University.
Main publications:
(1937) ‘Bertrand Russell's empiricism’, in I. Hedenius et a!, (eds), Adolf Phalén in Memoriam: Philosophical Essays, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.
(1937) Den logiska strukturen hos Bostroms Jilosofi. En studie i klassisk metafysik [The Logical Structure of the Philosophy of Bostrom: A Study in Classical Metaphysics], Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.
(1944) ‘The logical construction of the world: a critical analysis of Rudolf Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Well’, Theoria.
(1951) ‘Some problems in the logical analysis of legal science’, Theoria
reprinted in Contemporary Scandinavian Philosophy, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1972.
(1955) Plato’s Philosophy of Mathematics, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell
reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1977 (Japanese translation, 1975).
(1968) Philosophical Papers I, Stockholm: Philosophical Institute of Stockholm University.
(1972-1973) ‘How Carnap built the world in 1928’, Synthese
reprinted in J. Hintikka (ed.), Rudolf Carnap. Logical Empiricist, Dordrecht: Reidel. 1975.
(1982-1984) A History of Philosophy, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press (English version of a work in Swedish of 1958-1966: the chapters on Ryle, Austin,
Naess, Hágerstrom and Phalén are omitted in the English version).
Secondary literature:
Theoria 1978 (obituary and bibliography).
Anders Wedberg’s contribution to philosophy is a large number of logical and semantic analyses. In several of them mathematical logic is used. Most of these analyses deal with arguments in modern or earlier philosophy, but Wedberg has also elucidated fundamental ideas in other theoretical fields: legal science, linguistics and the theory of measurement.
He has also dealt, further, with Aristotelian syllogistic, deontic logic and the foundations of mathematics. A few of these analyses are collected in Philosophical Papers(1968). The critical talent is outstanding in Wedberg's work: brilliant examples are his two studies of Carnap's Aufbau, published in 1944 and 1972-1973.
There are also ingenious constructive suggestions in Wedberg’s writings, for example in the paper of 1951, one of the most weighty contributions to the development of the Scandinavian realism of law after Hágerstrom.
Anders Wedberg's philosophical reflection was to a high degree stimulated by the work of Bertrand Russell. In questions of method Wedberg was influenced by the logical empiricists, but he never embraced their general theses. In a short period of his youth, during which he published the early writings on Russell and Bostrom 1937), he was an adherent of the Uppsala school of conceptual analysis.
In contrast to the logical empiricists, this school had a deep interest in the history of philosophy, an interest that Wedberg retained ail his life. With Plato's Philosophy of Mathematics (1955) and A History of Philosophy (1982-1984) he made important contributions to the study of the history of theoretical philosophy. A much discussed detail in the former is the thesis that there is a fundamental antinomy in Plato’s theory of ideas.
As a historian of philosophy Wedberg was an innovator as regards method, especially in his precision technique. Two distinctive features of A History of Philosophy are the illuminating comparisons of certain ideas in ancient philosophy with certain ideas in modern mathematical logic and the great attention paid to Bolzano and Frege.