Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap . Philosopher and logician, one of the leaders of neopositivism . He was an active member of the Vienna Circle . He taught philosophy at the Universities of Vienna and Paris . Since 1936 , he has worked in the United States , he is a professor of philosophy at the University of California . Carnap denies the character of philosophy as a conception of the world and reduces it to the “logical analysis of the language” of science , based on the resources of mathematical logic. In Carnap’s conception, the theoretical-cognitive foundations of said analysis represent a union of idealistic empiricism and conventionalism in the interpretation of logic and mathematics . ^[1]

The philosophical conception of neopositivism is interwoven – in Carnap’s works – with research on the theory of logic and the logical-methodological analysis of science . In the evolution of Carnap’s ideas about the nature of the logical, two stages can be distinguished: 1) the syntactic, that in which Carnap examined the logic of science as the logical syntax of the language of science, and 2) the semantics , a stage in which Carnap takes as the object of research not only the formal aspect, but also the conceptual aspect of the “language” of science. In this last stage, Carnap attempts to structure a single system of formal logic based on the initial concepts of logical semantics. Carnap’s fundamental works: “Logical syntax of language” ( 1934 ), “Research in semantics” ( 1942-47 ), “Meaning and necessity” ( 1947 ). «Introduction to symbolic logic» ( 1954 ). ^[1]

Biographical summary

He was born in Ronsdorf , Germany on May 18 , 1891 and died in Los Angeles on September 14 , 1970 . He was one of the main representatives, together with Otto Neurath and Kurt Gödel , of the so-called Vienna Circle, founded by Moritz Schlick . In 1929 the Circle published a manifesto entitled The Scientific Conception of the World: the Vienna Circle, written by Neurath and signed by Carnap and the mathematician Hans Hahn , in which the fundamental principles of neopositivism were expressed, especially the rejection of metaphysics. as devoid of meaning. Starting from the theses of Wittgenstein ‘s Tractatus logico-philosophicus ( 1921 ) , the Circle emphasized the importance of the principle of verifiability, going so far as to affirm that the meaning of a term depends on its empirical verification.

Interested in showing that most philosophical problems come from improper or excessive use of language, Carnap was especially interested in the construction of logical systems capable of avoiding this, as well as in the analysis of scientific discourse, in works such as The Logical Structure of the World. ( 1928 ) or The logical syntax of language ( 1934 ). He also made important contributions to statistics, collected in Logical Foundations of Probability ( 1950 ).

Carnap was a professor in Vienna at the time of the Circle ( 1926-1931 ) and in Prague (1931-1936 ) . Before the Second World War broke out he moved to the United States , where he taught in Chicago ( 1938-1952 ) , in Princeton (1952-1954 ) and in Los Angeles , already in the last years of his academic career (1954-1954) . 1962 ).