Hans Reichenbach 1891 – 1953

Hans Reichenbach was a German-American philosopher of science and the founder of the Berlin Circle of logical empiricists. Trained in physics and mathematics, he produced foundational work on probability, induction, and the philosophy of space and time, including The Philosophy of Space and Time and The Theory of Probability. After fleeing Nazi Germany he taught in Istanbul and at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his students included Carl Hempel, Wesley Salmon, and Hilary Putnam. The distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification is owed to him.

Hans Reichenbach was born in 1891 in Hamburg into a merchant family. He studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Berlin, Munich, Gottingen, and Erlangen, where he took his doctorate in 1915 with a dissertation on probability and induction. After the First World War he attended Einstein's seminar on relativity in Berlin and from 1926 held a chair in Berlin specifically created for the philosophy of physics.

Forced into exile in 1933, he taught at Istanbul until 1938, when he was appointed to the philosophy department at UCLA. His major works are The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920), Axiomatization of the Theory of Relativity (1924), The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928), Experience and Prediction (1938), Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1944), Elements of Symbolic Logic (1947), The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), and the posthumous The Direction of Time (1956).

Reichenbach was the leading figure of the Berlin Circle and, after the dispersal of the Vienna Circle, the most systematic exponent of logical empiricism in the United States. His pragmatic vindication of induction, his axiomatic treatment of relativity, and his work on the direction of time and probabilistic causation shaped a generation of philosophers of science, including his students Carl Hempel, Wesley Salmon, and Hilary Putnam. He died at Los Angeles in April 1953.