Arthur Pap

Background

Arthur Pap was born on October 1, 1921, in Zurich, Switzerland to a Jewish family. His father was a successful businessman. Arthur had two brothers.

Education

Arthur Pap liked to play the piano when he was a child. He even studied with the classical pianist Walther Frey. This passion for playing the piano remained throughout all of his life. When he was at high school he also developed a passion for philosophy and, as a result, he entered the University of Zurich. There he took courses in philosophy and logic from Karl Dürr.

Later Pap went to the United States were he studied at the Juilliard School of Music for a while. In 1941, he entered Columbia University where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. Pap received a Master of Arts degree from Yale University and after that, he returned to Columbia University where he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Career

Arthur Pap started his academic career in 1946. He taught extension courses in philosophy at Columbia. The next year he took up a post of an instructor at the undergraduate college of the University of Chicago. There he developed a lifelong intellectual friendship with Rudolf Carnap. However, he soon left this post because he was not only required to teach chemistry alongside philosophy but also because he had very little latitude in how to teach philosophy.

Pap assumed a teaching position at Yale University in the mid-1950s. He read courses and held seminars on logic, probability and induction, the philosophy of Russell, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Arthur Pap wrote his first book The a Priori in Physical Theory in 1946. Later he published such books as Semantics and Necessary Truth and A Modern Introduction to Philosophy. In the summer of 1959, Pap completed a book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, which appeared posthumously.

Achievements

• Arthur Pap was an American educator, philosopher and writer who was famous for his books The a Priori in Physical Theory and Elements of Analytic Philosophy. He invented the concept of "analytical philosophy" and also developed a modified and flexible type of logical positivism. Pap is considered one of the ablest philosophers of his generation.

Works

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• book

  • Elements of Analytic Philosophy 1949
  • Semantics and Necessary Truth: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy 1949

Views

Arthur Pap was perhaps the last of the logical positivists, indeed a combative one. The prime example of this tormented position was his criticism of the theory that all necessary truth is analytic. He wrote about it in numerous articles and his most important book, Semantics and Necessary Truth.

Pap attacked phenomenalism for lacking an adequate account of the conditionals about sense-data to which it proposed to reduce statements about the material world. He worried away at the regularity theory of causation on the familiar ground that it cannot distinguish mere coincidental regularities from real causal connections.

Interests

• Philosophy of logic, philosophy of science, epistemology

References

• The Limits of Logical Empiricism: Selected Papers of Arthur Pap This volume collects some of the most significant papers of Arthur Pap. Pap’s work played an important role in the development of the analytic tradition. This goes beyond the merely historical fact of Pap’s influential views of dispositional and modal concepts. Pap's writings in philosophy of science, modality, and philosophy of mathematics provide insightful alternative perspectives on philosophical problems of current interest.
  2006