Logical Empiricism

Naturphilosophie, or its English counterpart, philosophy of nature, has a long and fascinating history and has undergone significant changes over time. 1 During the 19th and 20th centuries, many forms of philosophy of nature emerged, from monographs of philosophical remarks by physicistsoften written as diversions and philosophically naïve-and the treatises of the German idealists-often ambiguous and scientifically naïve-to the philosophically motivated writings of revolutionary scientists. The logical empiricists' philosophy of nature and science, however, stands out for its ability to synthesize various forms of inquiries: while its roots reach deep into the neo-Kantian "Wissenschaftslehre" of its day, it was framed in the empiricist traditions of English philosophers and scientists of the modern era. It developed both traditions further with the help of Frege's and Russell's logic and amalgamated them with contemporary French thinking about the conventionalist theory and practice of science. (Katherine Dunlop discusses conventionalism in her contribution to this volume, especially with reference to Poincaré and Neurath.) As Hans Reichenbach (1931/1978, 383) claimed in his programmatic pamphlet on philosophy of nature, philosophy of nature constitutes a great triumph of rationalism.. .. However, modern philosophy of nature must also be regarded as a triumph of empiricism.. .. Modern empiricism does not contradict rationalism because knowledge is conceived as a system constructed by reason upon which experience exerts a regulative and selective influence.

The present paper deals with the ontological status of numbers and considers Frege´s proposal in Grundlagen upon the background of the Post-Kantian semantic turn in analytical philosophy. Through a more systematic study of his philosophical premises, it comes to unearth a first level paradox that would unset earlier still than it was exposed by Russell. It then studies an alternative path that, departing from Frege's initial premises, drives to a conception of numbers as synthetic a priori in a more Kantian sense. On this basis, it tentatively explores a possible derivation of basic logical rules on their behalf, suggesting a more rudimentary basis to inferential thinking, which supports reconsidering the difference between logical thinking and AI. Finally, it reflects upon the contributions of this approach to the problem of the a priori.

This paper details how, besides his work on theoretical physics, Philipp Frank continued to remain interested in the philosophical questions of physics throughout his entire career. While this interest surfaced in different forms in different periods, Frank's late approach (developed mainly in the United States) constituted a sophisticated and complex inquiry into what he called the "humanistic background of science". Frank argued that we need to understand the physical (or scientific) endeavor as a whole. In this project, as it turned out, metaphysics could play a crucial role. Frank's American activities thus involved two core issues: (1) interpreting metaphysics in a way that would make it a meaningful enterprise for empiricists; and (2) investigating to what extent metaphysics, in this interpretation, can contribute to a better understanding of the natural sciences. Using the results of the latter, Frank tried to bridge the gap between the natural and social sciences.

According to Ernest Nagel, determinism is central to the scientific enterprise. Faced with the claim that determinism fails in quantum mechanics, Nagel proposed a notion of determinism which does not rely on a fundamental level of description, and can play a role in different scientific disciplines irrespective of their reducibility to physics. Nagel argues that determinism ultimately plays the role of a guiding principle in scientific research. In this way, Nagel argues that determinism has an enduring relevance in all domains of science, from quantum physics to the social sciences.

The paper explores the relation several members of the Vienna Circle had with the Brouwer and with the Dutch Significs group around Gerrit Mannoury. Mannoury was an early mentor to Brouwer, but later also frequently published in "Erkenntnis" and was connected to the Unity of Science Movement. The paper emphasizes first Brouwer´s influence on the Vienna Circle and focuses then on the relation between Neurath and Mannoury during Neurath´s exile in the Netherlands.

La crítica de Horkheimer al empirismo lógico del Círculo de Viena en su ensayo “El último ataque a la metafísica” (1937) motivó la respuesta de Neurath, principal blanco de las críticas, con la redacción del texto “Ciencia unificada y empirismo lógico: una réplica” (1937). En el presente artículo nos ocupamos de dilucidar el contexto de la polémica entre la Teoría Crítica y el empirismo lógico. Tomamos como eje argumental de nuestra exposición el conjunto de temáticas sobre las que Horkheimer fundamentó sus críticas, así como las distintas respuestas que ofreció Neurath ante tales invectivas. Asimismo, se muestran los paralelismos existentes que vinculan esta primera polémica con la “disputa sobre el positivismo” (Positivismusstreit).

Review of Husserl, Cassirer, Schlick: “Wissenschaftliche Philosophie” im Spannungsfeld von Phänomenologie, Neukantianismus und logischem Empirismus; Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism; The Significance of the Lvov- Warsaw School in the European Culture.

Il presente lavoro mira a fornire un approfondimento dell’opera di Ingmar Bergman e dei contesti filosofici, biografici e storico-culturali in cui prende forma, ponendo altresì l’accento sugli sviluppi del modernismo letterario svedese e sul pensiero del finlandese Eino Kaila. Il testo propone un’analisi comparativa degli autori conterranei e non a Bergman – tra cui Søren Kierkegaard, August Strindberg, Pär Lagerkvist, Stig Dagerman e Albert Camus – che gli hanno permesso di impostare le sue future ricerche filosofiche sul silenzio di Dio, sul dubbio e sull’angoscia (ångest) come strumenti della conoscenza, sul concetto centrale di utplånande (l’essere annichilito dallo scorrere del tempo) e sulla dialettica problematica tra agnosticismo puro e nostalgia fideistica. Giusta rilevanza sarà data alla produzione sia drammaturgica che letteraria di Bergman la quale ha rappresentato l’iniziale output creativo con cui il futuro regista – non abbandonando la scrittura per il teatro – darà espressione al clima angoscioso degli anni Quaranta. I risvolti e le risoluzioni dell’iniziale pessimismo che Bergman erediterà dal suo humus culturale saranno incarnati sul valore attribuito alla libertà dell’agire come fine supremo a cui l’uomo tende, in questo riallacciandosi alla filosofia di Immanuel Kant. Il fecondo rapporto con Kaila, eminente personalità dell’empirismo logico, è stato più volte sottolineato dal regista il quale dichiarò – nella prefazione al volume Quattro film – che da un punto di vista filosofico vi è stato un libro che ebbe un’enorme influenza su di lui: la psicologia della personalità (Persoonallisus in lingua originale) di Eino Kaila. La tesi centrale di questo testo, che l’uomo vive strettamente a contatto con i propri bisogni, negativi e positivi, ebbe su Bergman un effetto sconvolgente e costruì su questa base. Il lavoro presenterà in che modo alcuni snodi concettuali sorti dal pensiero di Kaila – rientrante anch’esso nelle cosiddette filosofie del doiazein (δοιάζειν) – siano confluiti nell’operato di Bergman e come al tempo siano stati rielaborati personalmente dal regista svedese. Successivamente una parte sarà dedicata all’analisi del secondo film della trilogia del silenzio di Dio, Nattvardsgästerna, in cui tutti i temi cari all’autore prenderanno corpo nei loro risvolti più ardui e drammatici. Come chiosa finale, in appendice, il testo si conclude con una disamina dettagliata di Ormskinnet, il saggio che il regista scrisse in occasione della celebrazione del premio Erasmus, conferitogli nel 1965 in ex aequo con Chaplin. Contenuto in Artiklar, essäer, föredrag, una silloge antologica curata dalla Norstedts, Ormskinnet – tradotto in italiano “la pelle di serpente” – indaga le cause della fame artistica, del ruolo che all’artista è concesso di coprire in un’epoca in cui l’impulso vitale della creazione, il suo orizzonte di senso, pare essersi estinto sotto lo spesso strato di nichilismo estetico delle avanguardie (in cui le arti iniziano a influenzarsi e a generarsi a vicenda) e dove l’arte si è emancipata dalla fede: il taglio del cordone ombelicale. Ciò che più conta per Bergman, riprendendo una massima del drammaturgo americano Eugene O’Neill, è il rapporto dell’uomo con Dio. Tutto il resto è privo di importanza

Quine thesis on holism is considered to be trivial. In his Two Dogma of Empiricism he rejected two dogma of analytic philosophy. The first dogma which is cleavage between truths that are analytic and truths that is synthetic, while the second dogma is the radical reductionism. The second dogma also implies the first as championed by the logical empiricist. It is pertinent to delineate the holism as a criterion of meaning for Quine, and how it debunked the two dogmas of empiricism. Holism in a brief sense is taking the whole not the part to address an issue or find meaning. In this sense, we aim to evaluate Quine’s holism to bring out its implications.

Thomas Nagel in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ suggests that we don’t yet have much idea of how mental entities could be identical with physical ones (though he wisely stops short of accusing physicalists of not meaning ANYTHING WHATSOEVER by their identity-claims).  Colin McGinn goes further by suggesting that we may forever remain in this state of ignorance and incomprehension because of the inherent limitations of the human intellect.  I argue that the mere possibility that McGinn is right shows that it is over-hasty to conclude from philosophy’s failure to solve its problems that there must be something wrong with the problems themselves.  I also try to relate Nagel’s and McGinn’s view to David Stove’s response to philosophy’s apparent failure to make much progress.  He seems pessimistic about whether we will ever fully understand what is wrong with some philosophical claims.

One way of explaining Rudolf Carnap’s mature philosophical view is by drawing an analogy between his technical projects — like his work on inductive logic — with a certain kind of conceptual engineering. After all, there are many mathematical similarities between Carnap’s work in inductive logic and a number of results from contemporary confirmation theory, statistics and mathematical probability theory. However, in stressing these similarities, the conceptual dependence of Carnap’s inductive logic on his work on semantics is downplayed. Yet it is precisely the conceptual resources made available to Carnap from his work on
semantics which allows him to understand his work on inductive logic as a kind of conceptual engineering project. The aim of this paper is to elucidate this engineering analogy in light of Carnap’s mature views through the lens of both inductive logic and semantics.

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse.

This paper looks at philosophical accusations of talking nonsense from the perspective of argumentation theory.  An accusation of this sort, when seriously meant, amounts to the claim that someone believes there is something she means by her utterance when in fact she means nothing whatsoever by it.  Such accusations may indeed be peculiar to philosophy.  They also involve the claim that there can be ILLUSIONS OF ARGUMENTATION, both inter- and intra-personal.  The problem of how one could possibly diagnose such illusions is raised and I suggest that, if there is a way, it will require a therapeutic rather than a polemical approach.  This suggestion is of course made by Wittgenstein and some of his followers but, in my view, it has remained undeveloped.  It often takes the form of a comparison with psychoanalysis.  I note that the more like psychoanalysis it becomes, the less like traditional argumentation, philosophical or otherwise, it will be.

Interactions between archaeology and philosophy are traced, from the ‘New Archaeology’s’ use of ideas from logical empiricism, the subsequent loss of confidence in such ideas, the falsificationist alternative, the rise of ‘scientific realism’, and the influence of the ‘new’ philosophies of science of the 1960s on post-processual archaeology. Some recent ideas from philosophy of science are introduced, and that discipline’s recent trajectory, featuring debate between realists and anti-realists, as well as a return to ‘classic’ concerns about explanation, causation, and laws of nature, is described. Many interactions between philosophy of science and archaeology have been based on a misplaced quest for a single ‘off-the-peg’ methodology or other philosophical framework for archaeology. Historical conditions have fostered the damaging idea that archaeologists have to choose between ‘positivism’ and subjectivism. I conclude by suggesting what kinds of contemporary philosophical work might interest archaeologists, and argue that philosophers should recognize the distinctive heterogeneity of archaeology.

According to Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein composed TS 209 (Philo-sophical Remarks) and handed it in to Russell in order to renew a grant from the Cambridge Council Cambridge in April-May 1930. Pichler (1994, 2009) and Rothhaupt (2010) challenged Rhees' hypothesis and claimed that Witt-genstein handed in TS 208 to Russell, and not TS 209. Against their view, I argue that Rhees' hypothesis best explains the major motive for the composition of Philosophical Remarks, and that it best explains what Wittgenstein handed in to Russell. While I give six reasons in favor of Rhees, I also try to explain how Russell, Moore, Littlewood, Schlick, and Waismann are linked with the composition of TS 208 and TS 209.

Résumé : Ce travail propose une réévaluation du schisme phénoménologico-analytique à la lumière des textes de Husserl et de Carnap qui en constituent l’un des fondements et qui cependant émergent d’un contexte philosophique et scientifique similaire. L’idée carnapienne de constitution comme « reconstruction rationnelle » et arbitraire du monde peut en effet paraître s’opposer terme à terme au « se-constituer » des choses que déploie la phénoménologie husserlienne, mais l’emploi par Carnap du vocabulaire de la constitution nous impose d’interroger le lien que l’entreprise de l’Aufbau entretient avec la constitution idéaliste transcendantale. La thèse de ce travail revient à affirmer que l’opposition Husserl/Carnap ne peut être interprétée dans les termes d’une opposition entre phénoménologie et analyse logique, ni non plus sur la base des concepts d’idéalisme transcendantal, de logicisme ou de phénoménalisme. Comprendre l’opposition entre les deux auteurs (et donc plus lointainement entre les deux mouvements dont ils endossent, au moins partiellement, la paternité) implique de se pencher sur les textes de jeunesse où l’un et l’autre élaborent leur concept respectif de constitution, en s’intéressant notamment au modèle logico-mathématique du formel dont ils héritent, et dont leur système de constitution présente le déploiement. Cette confrontation nous amène à définir la constitution comme l’élaboration d’un modèle continu de la discontinuité atteinte par la description phénoménologique pré-constitutive du monde – ce qui nous conduira à interroger la pertinence du modèle topologique pour la constitution.

Abstract: In this PhD thesis, I attempt to reevaluate the opposition between analytical and phenomenological philosophy through the study of Husserl’s and Carnap’s systems of constitution. Carnap’s idea of constitution as a “rational” and arbitrary “reconstruction” of the world seems to be radically antithetical to Husserl’s descriptive account of the “self-constitution” of the things themselves. Yet, Carnap’s use of the language of constitution, as well as his attempt to translate it into the language of logistics, lead us to question the links between his own enterprise and Husserl’s transcendental idealist constitution. What I am trying to demonstrate in this work is that the opposition between Husserl and Carnap cannot be interpreted either in terms of “phenomenology” and “analytical philosophy” or in terms of transcendental idealism, logicism and phenomenalism. In order to understand the opposition between Husserl and Carnap (and therefore, between continental and analytical philosophy), it is necessary to ask how and why, in their very first works and articles, they both conceived philosophy as a system of constitution. This leads us to give an account of Husserl’s and Carnap’s logico-mathematical models of the formal dimension of experience, and to define constitution as the elaboration of a continuous model for the discontinuity of the world – this discontinuity being given by the phenomenological and pre-constitutive description of the world. Would this imply then that topology is a suitable model for the construction of the world ?

In the 30s Carnap came increasingly into a close contact with American philoso-phers, a contact which grew even tighter through his emigration. Most of these American philosophers where close to pragmatism. In this paper I present a detailedoverview of this confrontation and convergence of Carnap’s philosophy with prag-matism. I show that this contact with pragmatism did not provoke a liberalizationof empiricism, as is often thought, but that an internal liberalization of empiricismin the Vienna Circle was the condition of this convergence and eliminated many caveats the pragmatists had against the initial positions of logical empiricism. Afterthis initial contact, Carnap, Ernest Nagel and Charles Morris tried to combine the views of the two empiricist philosophies into a common philosophic project. Thisproject failed after some years due to the internal contradictions between Carnap’s view of semantics and the pragmatist´s conception of meaning.

W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it is a part remained unexamined by historians and philosophers alike. In the last decade or so, however, analytic philosophers have begun to assess the history of their enterprise, and Quine's place within it. Building on this welcome development with the tools of intellectual history, this essay examines Quine's philosophical apprenticeship in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The basic tenets of Quine's mature thought set in early in his studies. Most notably, he displayed in his student writings a commitment to science as the primary theory of the world within which philosophical inquiry should take place. Yet he found the uncertain direction of interwar American philosophy uncongenial to his views. During a year of postdoctoral research in Europe, Quine encountered the work of analytic philosophers and logicians such as Rudolf Carnap and Alfred Tarski. Their scientific program for philosophy captivated Quine, who returned to Harvard a champion of their work. For the rest of the 1930s, Quine was an indefatigable advocate of the analytic tradition; he brought news of European logic and scientific philosophy to American universities. His purpose in doing so was to move American philosophy towards science and away from what he saw as its metaphysical entanglements. The reception and transformation of analytic philosophy in the United States is shown to have involved a complex dynamic between foreign and domestic conceptions of philosophy.

Today, ‘‘scientism‘‘ is a concept with a negative connotation in every language. Although many definitions arecirculating, they have the assessment in common that scientism implicates a blind faith in science, which is wrong,simple-minded and even dangerous. However, the question is, who actually is defending that kind of position? Isscientism not just a ghost, a projection, an intellectual scarecrow in order to use many people’s fear of science inorder to bash rationalistic opinions? This article develops the argument that scientism is a real historical currentwhich can be analyzed in a concrete way. It starts by outlining the history of the French word ‘‘scientisme’’ and thedebates around it and discovers that the word is not at all of recent invention, but goes back to the 1840s andreceived its negative emphasis in the late nineteenth century when ‘‘scientific spiritism’’ on the one hand andCatholicism on the other were struggling against the ‘‘exaggerated’’ claims of natural science. A polemical counter-concept wastherefore needed.Soonafterward some scientistsand philosophers emerge,like Félix Le Dantec, AbelRey or Marcel Boll, who turn around the invective in order to describe their own optimistic and rationalistic con-ceptionofscience.Inconclusionthearticlearguesthatscientismhastobeunderstoodasanintellectualprojectandas an optimistic thought-style in science that does not at all correspond to the prejudices of the amoral scientist orthe power-hungry technocrat, but is represented mostly by outsiders and nonconformists.

In this paper, I study Otto Neurath's contribution to philosophy of science. In doing so, I challenge a popular reconstruction of Logical Empiricism. I will claim that this reconstruction is tenable only  if we neglect the relevance of Logical Empiricists' political agenda and its interplay with the philosophical stance of the Vienna Circle's left wing.

In the summer of 1932, Wittgenstein alleged that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science" made extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas.  In a letter to Schlick he complained that he would "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s."  In this paper, I look at the relationship between Carnap’s paper, subsequently reprinted as The Unity of Science, and Wittgenstein’s discussion of related topics in the first seven chapters of the Philosophical Remarks and other writing from 1929-1932.

The aim of this paper is consider the context and possible influences on Rudolf Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance (PoT). My thesis is the following: One can acknowledge the important influence of Hans Hahn, Karl Menger and Otto Neurath (i.e. the left wing of the Vienna Circle) along with Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann (i.e. the right wing of the Vienna Circle) and try to place the PoT in the context of Carnap’s immediate allies and opponents. But one can and actually have to locate it in a broader context, namely in the philosophy of logic of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. As is it less known, Russell introduced a certain pragmatic freedom into the considerations of logic but to obtain Carnap’s PoT we have to extend the boundaries of Russell’s freedom. To do this, Carnap accepted the idea of Wittgenstein, namely that logic is devoid of empirical content. Since logic is tautological (which Russell denied) we have the relevant freedom which resulted in the PoT. Hence Carnap’s writings about logic and philosophy in the 1930s could be seen and reconstructed as a(n either intended or unintended) syntheses or special combination of Russell’s inductive and pragmatical considerations on logic and Wittgenstein’s idea of an empty logic.

Nella suo testo su Hegel, Bloch reinterpreta la critica hegeliana dell'empirismo. Qui si fanno una serie di considerazioni critiche che in parte spiegano perché l'hegelismo (anche nella sua versione marxista) non è andato sostanzialmente avanti rispetto ad Hegel

I originally entitled this paper ‘Why are there no uncontroversial examples of philosophical nonsense?’, but since this seemed apt to provoke rather superficial responses, I decided to re-title it.  In it I ponder the fact that, not only are there no uncontroversial examples of philosophical nonsense, there are no uncontroversial examples of what one might call ‘analogue philosophical nonsense’.  These would be non-philosophical cases of someone’s believing he means something when in reality he means nothing.  (Someone’s saying, ‘It’s 5 o’clock on the sun’ is sometimes offered as an example.)  I ask what conditions such cases would need to satisfy.  What would count as a compellingly clear case of an illusion of meaning?  Why has no one described one?

This chapter serves as an introduction to the content and context of A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. It argues that Ayer's book did more than just misrepresent some of the theses of the Vienna Circle, but on the contrary, provided fresh insights into some of the debates among its members. While the influence of Ayer's book is undeniable, this chapter invites readers to reevaluate their knowledge about Ayer's work by reexamining his place and role in the history of analytic philosophy.

.Taking as my starting-point Cora Diamond’s paper ‘What nonsense might be’, I extend her ‘austere’ conception of nonsense to encompass the talking of nonsense.  We need to focus on the utterer as well as the utterance.  This brings out how difficult it is going to be to DIAGNOSE the talking of (philosophical) nonsense, without falling into the ‘sense that is senseless’ trap (PI, I, 500).  It is not clear to what extent Diamond sees the problem here.  I suggest that if there is a way round the difficulty, it will involve adopting a therapeutic approach.

In this article, I seek to shed new light on a lesser-known stage of the development of Hans Reichenbach's thought, namely his research, output and teaching activities at Istanbul University (1933-1938). I argue that the experience of Turkish exile was decisive in the elaboration of Reichenbach's probability theory of meaning and knowledge. His work Experience and Prediction, produced while in Istanbul, should therefore be put in its Turkish context of elaboration and reception. To this end, I will take into consideration not only Reichenbach's efforts to popularize and extend the Berlin Group's program of scientific philosophy in Turkey and throughout Europe in the 1930s, but also the forgotten work of Reichenbach's students-most of them women-at Istanbul University.

The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of German philosophy at Istanbul University in the context of the academic relations between Germany and Turkey. These complex relations should not just be restricted to the presence of exiled German scholars in 1930s Istanbul. They must be reassessed in light of a broader political transfer of knowledge. The 1920s German philosophy paradigms that stood against the neo-Kantian tradition were used in Turkey in order to lay the foundations of a national and secularized academic philosophy. With the nomination of several associate professors trained in Germany in the 1930s, Nicolai Hartmann’s “new ontology” as well as philosophical anthropology became the most discussed philosophical paradigms at Istanbul University. They were perceived as a substitute for certain conceptions of philosophy which were deemed traditional, as well as an alternative to the paradigms endorsed in 1930s Istanbul by exiled philosophers, such as logical empiricism. This influence of Hartmann’s ontology and anthropologic theories continued to grow after the Second World War until the 1960s, with the arrival of German professors who contributed to the training of the next generation of Turkish associate professors. What role did that largely institutionalized reception of German philosophy play in the linguistic and theoretical reorganization of Turkish academic philosophy? How were those different paradigms used in the discourse on modernity and how did they come to replace the devaluated traditional conceptions of philosophy?

Waismann was a central figure in the discussions of the Vienna Circle and in the development of some of the main theses of logical empiricism, which grew out of these discussions. The paper describes Waismann´s philosophical evolution in this early phase and emphasizes his philosophical interaction with the other members of the Circle, especially with Carnap. I will analyze three phases in this early period of Waismann´s philosophy. First, I will focus on Waismann´s presentation, defense and re-interpretation of Wittgenstein´s Tractatus within the Vienna Circle, which centrally shaped the early discussions of the Circle (until 1930). A substantial part of these discussions were between Waismann and Carnap. Secondly, I will stress that Waismann´s reception of Wittgenstein´s philosophy played an important role in the divergence within the Circle between those who progressively followed Wittgenstein´s revisionary views of his later philosophy of language (Schlick) and those who progressively rejected Wittgenstein (Carnap). In this phase, Waismann is often misrepresented as “reporting” Wittgenstein´s newest views to the Circle, while I want to highlight Waismann´s active role in solving the shortcomings of the Tractarian view, which were increasingly discussed in the Circle. Finally, I will briefly look at the way Waismann´s conflict with Carnap´s views on language and physicalism shaped Waismann´s central positions in his Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, a book reconceived and re-written in each of the mentioned three phases and finished shortly after Waismann´s emigration from Vienna.

Two groupings of philosophers can be seen as direct predecessors of the Vienna Circle (formed in 1923/24) and the Berlin group: the so-called First Vienna Circle (1907-1910) and the attendees at the Erlangen Conference (1923). Both groups were initiated by later members of the Vienna Circle. The pre-WWI group in Vienna consisted of Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank, while the Erlangen Conference was organized by Rudolf Carnap. Both the first Vienna Circle and the Erlangen Conference discussed ideas which took center stage in logical empiricism. Both groups were strongly interested in the philosophy of science and logic and tried to bring philosophy into contact with recent debates in the sciences; they felt that traditional philosophy was in a crisis and in need of reconstruction. As yet, however, the details of such a reconstruction were still pretty vague.

Si bien el Círculo de Viena se caracterizó por su rotundo rechazo de los enunciados metafísicos, como también por su objetivo común de lograr una ciencia unificada, no se puede considerar como un movimiento homogéneo. Su diversidad de apreciaciones filosóficas será clave para comprender la distancia entre las propuestas de Carnap y Neurath, como también los cambios del criterio verificacionista del significado a partir de la crítica que hace Quine al empirismo lógico. La base del criterio de verificabilidad consiste en que "para que un enunciado tenga significado, en el sentido cognoscitivo, debe ser empíricamente verificable" (Ashby, 1983, p. 121). Por lo tanto, los enunciados de observación o las proposiciones protocolares serán válidas siempre que puedan ser confirmadas a partir de datos de la experiencia. El problema que se deriva de ello consiste en el carácter privado de la experiencia que confirmaba las proposiciones protocolares; es decir, si las proposiciones protocolares describen datos de la experiencia, estos datos estarán reservados a quien experimenta sensiblemente dichos datos. El problema del carácter solipsista de las proposiciones protocolares se soluciona a partir de la tesis fisicalista. Esta afirma que "toda oración significativa de cualquier lenguaje o ciencia puede ser traducida a oraciones del lenguaje de la física; es decir, el lenguaje de la física es universal" (Ibídem, p. 141). De esta manera se logra brindar al criterio de verificabilidad un carácter intersubjetivo, comunicable de la experiencia.

Edward Witherspoon distinguishes Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense from Rudolf Carnap’s.  The latter does not fully take into account the fact that, if something really is nonsense, it has no more meaning than ‘Ab sur ah’ and therefore cannot have any logical properties.  He finds the Carnapian conception even in professed Wittgensteinians such as Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker who think of themselves as rejecting it.  My question is where this leaves the notion of PHILOSOPHICAL nonsense.  Could anything that was utterly devoid of content play the crucial deceptive role that nonsensicalists, including Wittgensteinians, assign it?  Could it ever be detected if it did?

The aim of this paper is to provide context for and historical exegesis of Carnap's alleged move from syntax to semantics. The Orthodox Received View states that there was a radical break, while the Unorthodox Received View holds that Carnap's syntactical period already had many significant semantical elements. I will argue that both of them are partly right, both of them contains a kernel of truth: it is true that Carnap's semantical period started after his Logical Syntax of Language – in one sense of semantics. But it is also true, that Carnap had semantical ideas already in LSL: though not (just) in the sense as URV maintained it. This latter sense of semantics is related to what is usually called inferentialism, and by getting a clearer picture of Carnap's original aims, context, and concept-usage, we might be in a better position to approach his alleged inferentialism.

In this chapter I propose a reinterpretation of the early Vienna Circle’s project of radical empiricism by reconsidering it in light of its under-appreciated Continental sources. After briefly discussing recent challenges to the standard view of logical positivism, such as its social-political context in “Red Vienna,” I examine the impact of “life-philosophical” thinkers such as Nietzsche and—in particular—Dilthey on the thought of Rudolf Carnap. Dilthey’s modernistic advocacy for
empirical scientific inquiry and his far-reaching critique of metaphysics as reflecting a conceptually unjustifiable and indemonstrable perspective expressing a “feeling of life” and interpretively (affectively, pragmatically) articulated in a “worldview” was embraced, via Dilthey’s student and Carnap’s teacher Herman Nohl (1879-1960), in Carnap’s pre-physicalist writings of the 1920s and the Vienna Circle’s 1929 manifesto. Such works announced the task of overcoming metaphysics and defending the
scientific life-stance (Lebenshaltung) against its authoritarian, metaphysical, and religious detractors.

We retrace the early reception of the Tractatus in the Vienna Circle, before analyzing the criticism of the Tractatus by Neurath and Carnap. While Neurath rejected vehemently the Tractarian picture theory of meaning and Wittgenstein's interpretation of elementary propositions formulated in a phenomenal language (Wittgenstein 1929), Carnap's criticism of the Tractatus was shaped by the need to develop a new logical syntax which goes beyond the one specified in the Tractatus. In this, he was not only influenced by Neurath's criticism of the Tractatus, but also by his conversations with Waismann about the need for and the nature of a new logical syntax.

The aim of this paper is to give a biographical, historical, and philosophical reconstruction of Neurath's final years in England. Besides reconstructing Neurath's arrival to England, in the context of his life and philosophical introduction at Oxford, I will argue that since the 1930s, Neurath was eager to develop a brand for logical empiricism. This brand was based not on theoretical commitments, but on practical considerations and decisions. Using a detailed case study on Neurath's relation to the Hungarian sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim, I show that the development of their connections documents how Neurath gave more and more priority to practical aims during his English years. Finally, the concluding section points to some further considerations on Neurath's legacy.

On a widespread reading, the Carnap-Quine debate about ontology concerns the objectivity and non-triviality of ontological claims. I argue that this view mischaracterizes Carnap’s aims in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (ESO): Carnap’s fundamental goal is to free up decisions about scientific language from constraints deriving from ontological doctrine. The contention, based on his internal/external (i/e) distinction, that ontological claims are either meaningless or trivial was Carnap’s means to achieving this more fundamental goal. Setting the record straight on this point brings out three important and often overlooked features of Carnap’s views on ontology. First, the target of Carnap’s critique in ESO is not Quine’s mature views on ontology, as laid out in “On What There Is”. Rather, Carnap is responding to arguments for nominalism that were given by Tarski, Goodman, and Quine in the 1940s. Second, a more general rejection of conservatism in theory choice is essential to Carnap’s aims and is implicit in his fundamental views on language. Third, even if it turns out to be tenable, the i/e distinction is not adequate for Carnap’s aim in ESO. Drawing on his basic conception of scientific language, I will suggest an alternative approach on his behalf.

This essay explores Kaila's interpretation of the special theory of relativity. Although the relevance of his work to logical empiricism is well-known, not much has been written on what Kaila calls the 'Einstein-Minkowski invariance theory'. Kaila's interpretation focuses on two salient features. First, he emphasizes the importance of the invariance of the spacetime interval. The general point about spacetime invariance has been known at least since Minkowski, yet Kaila applies his overall tripartite theory of invariances to space, time and spacetime in an original way. Second, Kaila provides a non-conventionalist argument for the isotropic speed of electromagnetic signals. The standard Einstein synchrony is not a mere convention but a part of a larger empirical theory. According to Kaila's holistic principle of testability, which stands in contrast to the theses of translatability and verification, different items in the theory cannot be sharply divided into conventional and empirical. Kaila's invariantism/non-conventionalism about relativity reflects an interesting case in the gradual transition from positivism to realism within the philosophy of science.

The Viennese-born polymath Otto Neurath died on 22 December 1945 in Oxford, a few months after the end of World War Two. A social engineer and sociologist of happiness, Neurath was not only a socially sensitive educator, advocating for any institute and organization that was concerned with the well-being of people; he was also a trained scientist and philosopher. Studying mathematics, economics, history, philosophy, and physics in Vienna and then in Berlin during the early years of the long twentieth century, Neurath became involved in many of the disputes among social and natural scientists that shaped the course of the fields.