41 Facts About Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter.

Rudolf Carnap was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.

Rudolf Carnap's mother came from an academic family; her father was an educational reformer and her oldest brother was the archaeologist Wilhelm Dorpfeld.

Rudolf Carnap was raised in a profoundly religious Protestant family, but later became an atheist.

Rudolf Carnap intently studied Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason during a course taught by Bruno Bauch, and was one of very few students to attend Gottlob Frege's courses in mathematical logic.

Rudolf Carnap then attended the University of Jena, where he wrote a thesis defining an axiomatic theory of space and time.

Rudolf Carnap then wrote another thesis in 1921, under Bauch's supervision, on the theory of space in a more orthodox Kantian style, and published as Der Raum in a supplemental issue of Kant-Studien.

Rudolf Carnap accepted the effort to surpass traditional philosophy with logical innovations that inform the sciences.

Rudolf Carnap wrote a letter to Russell, who responded by copying by hand long passages from his Principia Mathematica for Carnap's benefit, as neither Carnap nor his university could afford a copy of this epochal work.

Rudolf Carnap discovered a kindred spirit when he met Hans Reichenbach at a 1923 conference.

Rudolf Carnap thereupon joined an informal group of Viennese intellectuals that came to be known as the Vienna Circle, directed largely by Schlick and including Hans Hahn, Friedrich Waismann, Otto Neurath, and Herbert Feigl, with occasional visits by Hahn's student Kurt Godel.

Rudolf Carnap wrote the 1929 manifesto of the Circle, and initiated the philosophy journal Erkenntnis.

In 1931, Rudolf Carnap was appointed Professor at the German University of Prague.

From 1936 to 1952, Rudolf Carnap was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Rudolf Carnap wrote books on semantics, modal logic, and on the philosophical foundations of probability and inductive logic.

Rudolf Carnap had earlier refused an offer of a similar job at the University of California, Berkeley, because accepting that position required that he sign a loyalty oath, a practice to which he was opposed on principle.

Rudolf Carnap taught himself Esperanto when he was 14 years of age, and remained sympathetic to it.

Rudolf Carnap later attended the World Congress of Esperanto in 1908 and 1922, and employed the language while traveling.

Rudolf Carnap had four children by his first marriage to Elizabeth Schondube, which ended in divorce in 1929.

Rudolf Carnap married his second wife, Elizabeth Ina Stoger, in 1933.

From 1919 to 1921, Rudolf Carnap worked on a doctoral thesis called Der Raum: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre.

For Rudolf Carnap thought that in many instances those disciplines use the same concepts, but with totally different meanings.

Hence, Rudolf Carnap characteristically argued that there had to be three separate notions of space.

From 1922 to 1925, Rudolf Carnap worked on a book which became one of his major works, namely Der logische Aufbau der Welt, which was accepted in 1926 as his habilitation thesis at the University of Vienna and published as a book in 1928.

Rudolf Carnap gives the label "constitution theory" to this epistemic-logical project.

Rudolf Carnap argues that all concepts must be ranked over a hierarchy.

Rudolf Carnap explains that a concept can be reduced to another when all sentences containing the first concept can be transformed into sentences containing the other.

For Rudolf Carnap, a pseudo-problem is a philosophical question which, on the surface, handles concepts that refer to our world while, in fact, these concepts do not actually denote real and attested objects.

Rudolf Carnap believed that the difficulty with traditional philosophy lay in the use of concepts that are not useful for science.

Rudolf Carnap explains that to be meaningful, a sentence should be factual.

At that point in his career, Rudolf Carnap attempted to develop a full theory of the logical structure of scientific language.

In other words, Rudolf Carnap believes that every logical language is correct only if this language is supported by exact definitions and not by philosophical presumptions.

Rudolf Carnap explains that the choice of a language should be guided according to the security it provides against logical inconsistency.

Clearly enough, the principle of tolerance was a sophisticated device introduced by Rudolf Carnap to dismiss any form of dogmatism in philosophy.

Rudolf Carnap thought that according to certain conditions, the concept of probability had to be interpreted as a purely logical concept.

Rudolf Carnap claims that the problem of induction is a matter of finding a precise explanation of the logical relation that holds between a hypothesis and the evidence that supports it.

Rudolf Carnap was convinced that there was a logical as well as an empirical dimension in science.

Rudolf Carnap believed that one had to isolate the experiential elements from the logical elements of a given body of knowledge.

The Rudolf Carnap Papers contain thousands of letters, notes and drafts, and diaries.

Rudolf Carnap used the mail regularly to discuss philosophical problems with hundreds of others.

Rudolf Carnap employed this writing system extensively beginning in his student days.