Fahnenbergplatz, 79085 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
From 1910 to 1914 Carnap studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau (now Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg).
Gallery of Rudolf Carnap
Fürstengraben 1, 07743 Jena, Germany
After serving in World War I, Carnap earned a doctorate in 1921 at Jena with a dissertation on the concept of space.
Career
Gallery of Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap
Gallery of Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), American philosopher of German origin. (Photo by: Photo 12/Universal Images Group)
Fahnenbergplatz, 79085 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
From 1910 to 1914 Carnap studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau (now Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg).
The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy
(In The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap adopts the ...)
In The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap adopts the position of "methodological solipsism" and shows that it is possible to describe the world from the immediate data of experience. In his Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, he asserts that many philosophical problems are meaningless.
(In The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap explains how hi...)
In The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap explains how his entire theory of language structure came to him like a vision when he was ill. He postulates that concepts of the theory of logic are purely syntactical and therefore can be formulated in logical syntax.
Rudolf Carnap was a German-born American philosopher of logical positivism. He made important contributions to logic, the analysis of language, the theory of probability, and the philosophy of science.
Background
Rudolf Carnap was born on May 18, 1891, in Ronsdorf (now Wuppertal), Germany, to the family of Johannes S. Carnap and Anna (née Dorpfeld) Carnap.
His father came from a family of poor weavers, but after long and hard work became the prosperous and respected owner of a ribbon-making factory. Rudolf's mother was a teacher and an aspiring author. As he watched his mother write, the young Rudolf became fascinated by what he came to regard as the magical activity of putting words on paper.
Rudolf had one sister whose name he neglects to mention in his autobiography. Their mother obtained permission to teach the children at home, but did so for only an hour a day. His father died when he was only four years old. Then the family moved to Barmen.
Education
Rudolf Carnap attended the local school, where both mathematics and Latin attracted him, one by the exactness of its concepts, the other by its expressive but rational structure.
From 1910 to 1914 Carnap studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Universities of Jena (now Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena) and Freiburg im Breisgau (now Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg). At Jena, he attended the lectures of Gottlob Frege, subsequently acknowledged as the greatest logician of the 19th century. Frege's ideas exerted a deep influence on Carnap.
After serving in World War I, Carnap earned a doctorate in 1921 at Jena with a dissertation on the concept of space. He argued that the conflicts between the various theories of space then held by scholars resulted from the fact that those theories actually dealt with quite different subjects; he called them, respectively, formal space, physical space, and intuitive space and exhibited their principal characteristics and fundamental differences.
For several years afterward Carnap was engaged in private research in logic and the foundations of physics and wrote a number of essays on problems of space, time, and causality, as well as a textbook, Abriss der Logistik, (1929) in symbolic, or mathematical, logic.
In 1923 Carnap met Hans Reichenbach, with whom he later founded and edited Erkenntnis (1930-1940), the journal of the logical empiricists. Through Reichenbach, he met Moritz Schlick, head of the Philosophical Circle at the University of Vienna. In 1926 Carnap became an instructor of philosophy there and participated in the Circle. Ludwig Wittgenstein attended meetings of the Circle in 1927, becoming another influence on Carnap's thought.
Carnap won wide recognition among philosophers with the publication of the Logische Aufbau der Welt (Logical Structure of the World) in 1928. He offered a new methodology, which called for the reduction of all knowledge to private, subjective sense-data in order to construct a technical system to embrace all known-objects and to solve philosophical problems. In 1928 Carnap also published Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie (Fictitious Problems in Philosophy). Following Wittgenstein, he sought to show that metaphysical problems are pseudo-problems and that metaphysical sentences are "non-sense."
In 1931 Carnap became a professor of natural philosophy at the German university in Prague.
Carnap's investigations into logic and mathematics came to fruition with the publication of The Logical Syntax of Language (1934). Utilizing the distinction between "metalanguage" and "object language" advanced by Polish logicians, Carnap sought to develop a metalanguage (which he called "logical syntax") to elucidate and formalize the basic terms, formation rules, and transformation rules of object languages - that is, systems of logic and mathematics. He proposed his famous "principle of tolerance," which permits anyone to construct any language he wishes.
Fleeing from Nazism, Carnap went to the United States in December 1935. A few months later he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 1941 he became a naturalized citizen. Except for leaves to research or to teach elsewhere, he remained at Chicago until 1952.
At the university Carnap joined Otto Neurath and Charles W. Morris to found and edit the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Carnap's contribution to the encyclopedia is entitled Foundations of Logic and Mathematics (1930). This work displays a radical shift in his thinking. Persuaded by Alfred Tarski, Carnap had become convinced that the logical analysis of language extends beyond logical syntax and includes semantics, which deals with the reference of language to objects and contains the concepts of meaning and truth. Thus Carnap initiated a series of studies in semantics: Introduction to Semantics (1942), Formalization of Logic (1943), and Meaning and Necessity (1947).
In 1950 Carnap's massive book, The Logical Foundations of Probability, climaxed his investigations into the logic of empirical knowledge. From 1952 to 1954 Carnap advanced his researches into the logic of science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1954 he accepted the chair in philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, made vacant by the death of Reichenbach. Retiring from teaching in 1961, he continued as a research professor until his death on September 14, 1970, in Santa Monica, California, United States.
Although Carnap's parents were profoundly Protestant, their tolerant views allowed him to make a smooth transition into the more pantheistic and scientific ideology. Carnap gradually came to disbelieve in God.
Politics
It cannot be denied that Carnap had political interests that preceded or continued during his academic work. As a number of quotations from Carnap’s autobiography make clear, Carnap certainly had an interest in political matters and was even engaged in political organization throughout his life. For example, Carus mentions Carnap’s apparent sympathy for the socialist anarchism of Gustav Landauer.
Views
Carnap's work and method were strongly characterized by an emphasis on clarity and a conviction that clarity is achieved through expressing things in symbolic form. He himself wrote that from an early age: "I began to apply symbolic notation, now more frequently in the Principia form than in Frege's, in my own thinking about philosophical problems or in the formulation of axiom systems. When I considered a concept or a proposition occurring in a scientific or philosophical discussion, I thought I understood it clearly only if I felt that I could express it, if I wanted to, in symbolic language."
According to Carnap, a scientific theory is an axiomatized formal system, consisting of five parts:
(1) a formal language that includes logical and non-logical terms;
(2) a set of logical-mathematical axioms and rules of inference;
(3) a set of non-logical axioms that express the empirical part of the theory;
(4) a set of meaning postulates that state the meaning of the non-logical terms; those terms formalize the analytic truths of the theory;
(5) a set of rules of correspondence that give an empirical interpretation of the theory.
For Carnap, and the logical positivists in general, the distinction between observational and theoretical terms was central and crucial. In Philosophical Foundations of Physics (1966), Carnap based this difference on a distinction between empirical and theoretical laws. An empirical law, he claimed, deals with things that can be observed or measured. Such a law can be confirmed by direct observation. A theoretical law, however, deals with things that we cannot observe or measure, but that we can only infer from observation; it cannot be confirmed or justified by observation. It is a hypothesis that reaches beyond direct experience. In many cases the distinction is clear, but Carnap had to admit that it is sometimes arbitrary.
Quotations:
"Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems."
"Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements."
Personality
Carnap was logic personified. He was fabulously well-organized, maintaining an extensive card file system in which was summarised every book, significant paper, and major article he had read. This was combined with a prodigious ability to recall conversation and experience. The overwhelming impression he conveyed was one of great control and sustained momentum. One of his students compared him to a polite and friendly tank. He remained unfailingly courteous in the face of ferocious and in many cases ill-considered attacks on his work. Few people have worked for decades on such hugely difficult topics; even fewer have had the ability to carefully consider severe and sustained criticism while remaining gracious but unyielding.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Gottlob Frege
Connections
During World War I, Carnap married Elizabeth Schöndube. They had four children but divorced in 1929.
In 1933 he married Elizabeth Ina Stöger. This second marriage flourished, lasting until her death in 1964. The couple addressed each other as Carnap and ina, the latter to be always written in lower case. Carnap hated the name Rudolf and refused to be so-called; ina just wanted to be different.