Rudolf Carnap – författare

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence. . . . The chief virtue of the book is its systematic character. From Frege to Quine most philosophical logicians have restricted themselves by piecemeal and local assaults on the problems involved. The book is marked by a genial tolerance. Carnap sees himself as proposing conventions rather than asserting truths. However he provides plenty of matter for argument."—Anthony Quinton, Hibbert Journal

This is IV volume of eight in a series on Philosophy of the Mind and Language. For nearly a century mathematicians and logicians have been striving hard to make logic an exact science. But a book on logic must contain, in addition to the formulae, an expository context which, with the assistance of the words of ordinary language, explains the formulae and the relations between them; and this context often leaves much to be desired in the matter of clarity and exactitude. Originally published in 1937, the purpose of the present work is to give a systematic exposition of such a method, namely, of the method of logical syntax.

This is IV volume of eight in a series on Philosophy of the Mind and Language. For nearly a century mathematicians and logicians have been striving hard to make logic an exact science. But a book on logic must contain, in addition to the formulae, an expository context which, with the assistance of the words of ordinary language, explains the formulae and the relations between them; and this context often leaves much to be desired in the matter of clarity and exactitude. Originally published in 1937, the purpose of the present work is to give a systematic exposition of such a method, namely, of the method of logical syntax.

As a leading member of the Vienna Circle, Rudolph Carnap's aim was to bring about a "unified science" by applying a method of logical analysis to the empirical data of all the sciences. This work, first published in English in 1934, endeavors to work out a way in which the observation statements required for verification are not private to the observer. The work shows the strong influence of Wittgenstein, Russell, and Frege.

Rudolf Carnap and W. V. Quine, two of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, corresponded at length - and over a long period of time - on matters personal, professional, and philosophical. Their friendship encompassed issues and disagreements that go to the heart of contemporary philosophic discussions. Carnap (1891-1970) was a founder and leader of the logical positivist school. The younger Quine (1908) began as his staunch admirer but diverged from him increasingly over questions in the analysis of meaning and the justification of belief. That they remained close, relishing their differences through years of correspondence, shows their stature both as thinkers and as friends.The letters are presented here, in full, for the first time. The substantial introduction by Richard Creath offers a lively overview of Carnap's and Quine's careers and backgrounds, allowing the nonspecialist to see their writings in historical and intellectual perspective. Creath also provides a judicious analysis of the philosophical divide between them, showing how deep the issues cut into the discipline, and how to a large extent they remain unresolved.

Two Essays on Entropy by Rudolf Carnap (edited with an introduction by Abner Shimony) brings a major twentieth-century philosopher of science to the front lines of thermodynamics, probability, and inductive logic. Written during Carnap’s 1952–54 fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, these essays pursue an “abstract concept of entropy” usable for scientific inference while testing, with unusual clarity, the coherence of the physicists’ own statistical notion. Carnap’s guiding claim is bold and bracing: entropy belongs with temperature and pressure as an objective physical magnitude, not a merely logical or informational index. From this stance he scrutinizes the classical formulations of Boltzmann and Gibbs, rejects fashionable identifications of entropy with “negative information,” and articulates a principle of physical magnitudes to require that finer descriptions of a system accord with coarser, thermodynamic attributions. Shimony’s editorial introduction situates Carnap’s project within postwar debates on probability (frequency, propensity, and epistemic readings), ergodicity, and coarse- versus fine-grained ensembles, clarifying both the reach and the limits of Carnap’s proposal.Presented together for the first time as Carnap had originally envisioned, the essays are lightly but thoughtfully edited: overlapping prefatory sections are removed, a concise “Brief Formulation” is foregrounded, and cross-references rationalized to reveal the architecture of the program as a whole. Readers see Carnap extend Boltzmann’s entropy beyond cell partitions, probe the logical pitfalls of description-dependent definitions, and sketch a continuous, geometry-based alternative aimed at eliminating arbitrary coarse-graining. The result is a rare conversation across philosophy and physics—historically grounded, methodologically incisive, and still sharply relevant to contemporary work in statistical mechanics, information theory, and the foundations of data-driven inference. A vital resource for scholars in philosophy of science, physics, and the history of analytic philosophy, Two Essays on Entropy restores a rigorous, physicalist account of order, randomness, and explanation to center stage.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Rudolf Carnap and Richard C. Jeffrey’s Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, Volume I gathers seminal work charting Carnap’s late-career re-architecture of inductive logic. Moving beyond the single preferred c\*-method of Logical Foundations of Probability (1950), this volume documents the shift to a “continuum” of c-functions and then to a still broader framework sensitive to analogy and similarity, informed by de Finetti’s representation theorem and contemporary probability/statistics. Anchored by Carnap’s “Basic System” (presented here in detail) and complemented by foundational essays—including the programmatic “Inductive Logic and Rational Decisions”—the collection recasts logical probability in the idiom of events, models, and conditionalization, aligning formal inductive methods with Bayesian decision theory while distinguishing logical from statistical notions of information and entropy.Framed by Jeffrey’s editorial introduction and Carnap’s own historical notes, the book doubles as an intellectual roadmap through the 1950s–60s renaissance in formal epistemology: collaborations with John Kemeny, dialogue with Savage and Putnam, and the systematic adoption of mathematical tools that were absent from Carnap’s earlier work. For philosophers of science, statisticians, and decision theorists, Volume I offers both a definitive statement of Carnap’s mature foundations and a launch pad for the unfinished upper stories—issues of confirmation, learning from analogy, and representation—that Volume II continues. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to see how inductive logic became conversant with modern probability while retaining a distinctly logical—normative—conception of rational belief.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Two Essays on Entropy by Rudolf Carnap (edited with an introduction by Abner Shimony) brings a major twentieth-century philosopher of science to the front lines of thermodynamics, probability, and inductive logic. Written during Carnap’s 1952–54 fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, these essays pursue an “abstract concept of entropy” usable for scientific inference while testing, with unusual clarity, the coherence of the physicists’ own statistical notion. Carnap’s guiding claim is bold and bracing: entropy belongs with temperature and pressure as an objective physical magnitude, not a merely logical or informational index. From this stance he scrutinizes the classical formulations of Boltzmann and Gibbs, rejects fashionable identifications of entropy with “negative information,” and articulates a principle of physical magnitudes to require that finer descriptions of a system accord with coarser, thermodynamic attributions. Shimony’s editorial introduction situates Carnap’s project within postwar debates on probability (frequency, propensity, and epistemic readings), ergodicity, and coarse- versus fine-grained ensembles, clarifying both the reach and the limits of Carnap’s proposal.Presented together for the first time as Carnap had originally envisioned, the essays are lightly but thoughtfully edited: overlapping prefatory sections are removed, a concise “Brief Formulation” is foregrounded, and cross-references rationalized to reveal the architecture of the program as a whole. Readers see Carnap extend Boltzmann’s entropy beyond cell partitions, probe the logical pitfalls of description-dependent definitions, and sketch a continuous, geometry-based alternative aimed at eliminating arbitrary coarse-graining. The result is a rare conversation across philosophy and physics—historically grounded, methodologically incisive, and still sharply relevant to contemporary work in statistical mechanics, information theory, and the foundations of data-driven inference. A vital resource for scholars in philosophy of science, physics, and the history of analytic philosophy, Two Essays on Entropy restores a rigorous, physicalist account of order, randomness, and explanation to center stage.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Rudolf Carnap and Richard C. Jeffrey’s Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, Volume I gathers seminal work charting Carnap’s late-career re-architecture of inductive logic. Moving beyond the single preferred c\*-method of Logical Foundations of Probability (1950), this volume documents the shift to a “continuum” of c-functions and then to a still broader framework sensitive to analogy and similarity, informed by de Finetti’s representation theorem and contemporary probability/statistics. Anchored by Carnap’s “Basic System” (presented here in detail) and complemented by foundational essays—including the programmatic “Inductive Logic and Rational Decisions”—the collection recasts logical probability in the idiom of events, models, and conditionalization, aligning formal inductive methods with Bayesian decision theory while distinguishing logical from statistical notions of information and entropy.Framed by Jeffrey’s editorial introduction and Carnap’s own historical notes, the book doubles as an intellectual roadmap through the 1950s–60s renaissance in formal epistemology: collaborations with John Kemeny, dialogue with Savage and Putnam, and the systematic adoption of mathematical tools that were absent from Carnap’s earlier work. For philosophers of science, statisticians, and decision theorists, Volume I offers both a definitive statement of Carnap’s mature foundations and a launch pad for the unfinished upper stories—issues of confirmation, learning from analogy, and representation—that Volume II continues. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to see how inductive logic became conversant with modern probability while retaining a distinctly logical—normative—conception of rational belief.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

The first volume of the Library of Living Philosophers (LLP) appeared in 1939, the brainchild of the late Professor Paul A. Schilpp. Schilpp saw that it would help to eliminate confusion and endless sterile disputes over interpretation if great philosophers could be confronted by their capable philosophical peers and asked to reply. As well as a number of critical essays with the chosen philosopher's replies to each essay, each volume would include an intellectual autobiography and an up-to-date bibliography The LLP series has exceeded even Schilpp's expectations, enabling great philosophers to do more than clarify by extending and elaborating their thoughts. A volume in the Library of Living Philosophers is not merely a commentary on a philosopher's work; it is a critical part of that work.

In The Logical Structure of the World (1928), Rudolf Carnap analyzes the fundamental elements of experience, the derivation of qualities, the construction of sensory classes, and the construction of the special and temporal orders. In the short essay, Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (1928), Carnap advances the view, which was to become influential in the 1930s, that in many philosophical disputes, both sides of the argument can be discarded as strictly meaningless. This is one of three books that Open Court is making available in paperback reprint in its Open Court Classics series. The other two are Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language and Schlick's Theory of Knowledge.

Rudolf Carnap's entire theory of Language structure "came to me," he reports, "like a vision during a sleepless night in January 1931, when I was ill." This theory appeared in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934). Carnap argued that many philosophical controversies really depend upon whether a particular language form should be used. This leads him to his famous "Principle of tolerance" by which everyone is free to mix and match the rules of his language and therefore his logic in any way he wishes. In this way, philosophical issues become reduced to a discussion of syntactical properties, plus reasons of practical convenience for preferring one form of language to another. In a tour de force of precise reasoning, Carnap also indicated how two model languages could be constructed. This is one of three books which Open Court is making available in paperback reprint in its Open Court Classics series. The other two are Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World and Schlick's General Theory of Knowledge.

A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical empiricists set out to reform traditional philosophy with a new set of doctrines more firmly grounded in logic and science. Criticism and decline Because of Nazi persecution, most of the European adherents of logical empiricism moved to the United States in the late 1930s. During the 1940s, many of their most cherished tenets became targets of criticism from outsiders as well as from within their own ranks. Philosophers of science in the late 1950s and 1960s rejected logical empiricism and, starting in the 1970s, presented such alternative programs such as scientific realism with evolutionary epistemology. A resurgence of interest During the early 1980s, philosophers and historians of philosophy began to study logical empiricism as an important movement. Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s-for whom the debate over logical empiricism now seems to have been largely motivated by professional politics-these philosopher no longer have to take positions for or against logical empiricism. The result has been a more balanced view of that movement, its achievements, its failures, and its influence. Hard-to-find core writings now available This collection makes available a selection of the most influential and representative writings of the logical empiricists, important contemporary criticisms of their doctrines, their responses, as well as the recent reappraisals. Introductions to each volume examine the articles in historical context and provide important background information that is vital to a full understanding of the issues discussed. They outline prevalent trends, identifying leading figures and summarize their positions and reasoning, as well as those of opposing thinkers.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.

Dieses Buch stellt eine neue, von CARNAP entwickelte Theorie der Induktion und Wahrscheinlichkeit dar, die durch die folgenden grund­ legenden Auffassungen charakterisiert ist. 1. Jedes induktive Schließen, im weiten Sinne des nichtdeduktiven oder nichtdemonstrativen Schluß­ folgerns, ist ein Schließen auf Grund von Wahrscheinlichkeit. 2. Daher ist die induktive Logik als Theorie von den Prinzipien des induktiven Schließens dasselbe wie Wahrscheinlichkeitslogik. 3. Der Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit, der als Grundbegriff der induktiven Logik dienen soll, ist eine logische Relation zwischen zwei Aussagen oder Sätzen, näm­ lich der Grad der Bestätigung einer Hypothese auf der Grundlage gegebe­ ner Prämissen. 4. Der sogenannte Häufigkeitsbegriff der Wahrschein­ lichkeit, wie er in statistischen Untersuchungen verwendet wird, ist zwar an und für sich ein wichtiger wissenschaftlicher Begriff, als Grundbegriff der induktiven Logik jedoch unbrauchbar. 5. Alle Prinzipien und Lehr­ sätze der induktiven Logik sind analytisch. 6. Daher hängt die Gültig­ keit des induktiven Schließens nicht von irgendwelchen synthetischen Voraussetzungen ab, wie etwa dem vielumstrittenen Prinzip der Gleich­ förmigkeit der Welt. Die erste Aufgabe dieses Buches ist die Erörterung der allgemeinen philosophischen Probleme betreffend die Natur der Wahrscheinlichkeit und des induktiven Schließens, die uns zu den eben erwähnten Auffassun­ gen führen wird. Das zweite Ziel ist der tatsächliche Aufbau eines Systems der induktiven Logik, einer Theorie, die auf den angeführten Prinzipien beruht. Ein besonderes Augenmerk wurde in diesem Buch darauf gelegt, die intuitive philosophische Grundlegung klar von dem technischen Aufbau des Systems der induktiven Logik zu trennen.