Rudolf Carnap 1891 – 1970

Rudolf Carnap was a German-born philosopher and a leading figure of the Vienna Circle and of logical empiricism. His Logical Structure of the World attempted to construct all scientific concepts from elementary experiences using the logic of Russell and Whitehead, while his Logical Syntax of Language proposed that philosophical questions are best understood as questions about the syntax of scientific languages. After emigrating to the United States in 1935, he developed an inductive logic of confirmation and a tolerant pluralism about formal frameworks. His work shaped the course of twentieth-century philosophy of science.

Rudolf Carnap was born in 1891 in Ronsdorf in the Rhineland, the son of a ribbon manufacturer. He studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Jena and Freiburg, attended Frege's lectures on logic at Jena, and took his doctorate in 1921 with a dissertation on the concept of space. From 1926 he was a member of the Vienna Circle around Moritz Schlick, and from 1931 professor in Prague.

His major works are The Logical Structure of the World (Aufbau, 1928), The Logical Syntax of Language (1934), Foundations of Logic and Mathematics (1939), Meaning and Necessity (1947), Logical Foundations of Probability (1950), and the late Philosophical Foundations of Physics. Driven into exile by the Nazi takeover, he settled in 1936 at the University of Chicago and from 1954 until his retirement at UCLA. He was the chief editor of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science.

Carnap's program of logical empiricism — the analysis of scientific concepts in a precise constructed language, the elimination of metaphysics as nonsense, the principle of tolerance in the choice of linguistic frameworks, and the long project of inductive logic — was the most ambitious and the most carefully executed expression of analytic philosophy's first half-century. He died at Santa Monica in September 1970.