The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario. As those associated closely with the work of the Division over the years (...) know well, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of pre sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and Computability Theory, Foun dational Problems in the Special Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol ogy and Linguistics, and Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

This collection is the final volume of a four book survey of the state of phenomenology fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl. Its publication represents a landmark in the comprehensive treatment of contemporary phenomenology in all its vastness and richness. The diversity of the issues raised here is dazzling, but the main themes of Husserl's thought are all either explicitly treated, or else they underlie the ingenious approaches found here. Time, historicity, intentionality, eidos, meaning, possibility/reality, and teleology are (...) the main concerns of this collection devoted to studies in aesthetics, metaphysics and literary interpretation, written by such authors as, among others, R. Cobb-Stevens, C. Moreno Marquez, J. Swiecimski, Sitansu Ray and M. Kronegger. These original studies of phenomenological aesthetics and literary theory by scholars from all parts of the world were gathered by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learn ing during the year 1988/89 during its assessment of the phenomeno logical movement, fifty years after Husserl's death. IX A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXVII, ix. (shrink)

Logical positivism is often characterized as a set of naive doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This essay reconstructs the history of a “caricature” and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed (...) to appreciate the subtleties of European scientific philosophy. It argues that the received view has a more complicated history and was frequently promoted by the European positivists themselves. The essay shows that the view has roots in both American and European scientific philosophy and emerged as a result of the complex interplay between the two communities in the years before the intellectual migration. (shrink)

In this collection of essays one of the preeminent philosophers of science writing offers a reinterpretation of the enduring significance of logical positivism, the revolutionary philosophical movement centered around the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 30s. Michael Friedman argues that the logical positivists were radicals not by presenting a new version of empiricism but rather by offering a new conception of a priori knowledge and its role in empirical knowledge. This collection will be mandatory reading for (...) any philosopher or historian of science interested in the history of logical positivism in particular or the evolution of modern philosophy in general. (shrink)

Edited by a leading exponent of the school, this book offers--in the words of the movement's founders--logical positivism's revolutionary theories on meaning and metaphysics, the nature of logic and mathematics, the foundations of knowledge ...

One of the key events in the relations between the Central European philosophers and those of the Nordic countries was the Second International Congress for the ...

Introduction — Reductive and Nonreductive Physicalism A Short Survey of Six Decades of Philosophical Discussion Including an Attempt to Formulate a Version ...

Chapter INTRODUCTION: OTTO NEURATH, THE VIENNA CIRCLE AND THE PROTOCOL SENTENCE DEBATE Everybody familiar with contemporary analytical philosophy is likely ...

This book is a compact, accessible treatment of the main ideas advanced by the positivists, including Schlick, Carnap, Ayer, and the early Wittgenstein. Oswald Hanfling discusses such ideas as the 'verification principle' ('the meaning of this statement is the method of its verification') and the 'elimination of metaphysics, ' an attempt to show that metaphysical statements, for example about God, are unverifiable and therefore meaningless.

Do the terms “logical positivism” and “logical empiricism” mark a philosophically real and significant distinction? There is, of course, no doubt that the first term designates the group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, headed by Moritz Schlick and including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann and others. What is debatable, however, is whether the name “logical positivism” correctly distinguishes their doctrines from related ones called “logical empiricism” (...) that emerged from the Berlin Society for Scientific Philosophy around Hans Reichenbach which included Walter Dubislav, Kurt Grelling, Kurt Lewin and a young Carl Gustav Hempel.1 The .. (shrink)

Due to their acceptance of the verifiability principle, the only way left for logical positivists to argue for the meaningfulness of religious language was to accept some sort of emotivistic conception of it or to reduce it to the description of religious attitude. The verifiability principle, however, suffers from some severe limitations that make it inadequate as a criterion for cognitive meaning. To resolve these problems, logical positivists gave up the requirement of conclusive verifiability and defended a sort (...) of ‘liberalization’ of the verifiability principle. Carnap’s confirmability criterion for cognitive meaning, which is a liberalized form of the verifiability principle, is compatible with an orthodox conception of religious language since, from a theistic perspective, the existence of God can be confirmed through our observational statements. (shrink)

I argue that the analytic method has been circularly used to analyze the concept of “philosophy,” and that the result of this analysis has also been used to criticize African ethnophilosophy as nonphilosophical. I critically examine the criticism that ethnophilosophy implies cognitive relativism and the criticism that it implies authoritarianism. I defend ethnophilosophy against these criticisms, arguing that they are rooted in logical positivism, the view that philosophy essentially involves the use of the methods of science and (...) class='Hi'>logical analysis. I argue that such analysis and criticisms, given their pedigree, do not provide an adequate or accurate picture of the nature of philosophy. (shrink)

On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau, southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The Logical Construction of the World, a book that immediately became the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty years since has exerted a (...) powerful sway over the conduct of the philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy, economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap’s lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier. Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists, architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an enthusiastic audience on “Science and Life.” “I work in science,” he began, “and you in visible forms; the two are only different sides of a single life.”1 In this paper I will explore this “single life” of which the new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that drove both disciplines in the interwar years. 1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture, “Wissenschaft und Leben,” prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh , document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his How Experiments End and Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, edited with Bruce Hevly . His current project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern Physics. (shrink)

Logical positivism and the Vienna Circle are almost synonymous. The Vienna Circle grew in strength throughout the 1920s, attracting philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann, and Otto Neurath and mathematicians and scientists such as Kurt Gödel and Hans Hahn. It started as an intellectual club (initially known as the Ernst Mach Society), with Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, as its leading light. As the club debated and discussed problems in science, logic, and (...) philosophy, a definite consensus emerged. The members of the Vienna Circle were bound, initially at least, by commitments, to. (shrink)

By the lights of a central logical positivist thesis in modal epistemology, for every necessary truth that we know, we know it a priori and for every contingent truth that we know, we know it a posteriori. Kripke attacks on both flanks, arguing that we know necessary a posteriori truths and that we probably know contingent a priori truths. In a reflection of Kripke's confidence in his own arguments, the first of these Kripkean claims is far more widely accepted (...) than the second. Contrary to received opinion, the paper argues, the considerations Kripke adduces concerning truths purported to be necessary a posteriori do not disprove the logical positivist thesis that necessary truth and a priori truth are co-extensive. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis (...) Archiv, the Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism. (shrink)

I outline the theoretical framework of, and three research programs within American speculative philosophy of science during the period 1900-1931. One program applies verificationism to research in psychology, one investigates the methodology of research programs, and one analyses scientific explanation and other scientific concepts. The primary sources for my outline are works by Morris Raphael Cohen, Grace Andrus de Laguna, Theodore de Laguna, Edgar Arthur Singer Jr., Harold Robert Smart, and Marie Collins Swabey. I also use my outline to provide (...) a partial comparison of American speculative philosophy of science and 1930s logical positivism. My comparison suggests that logical positivism was a proposal for substantially narrowing down and winding back American philosophy of science and was based on positions that were already problematized in the American context. -/- . (shrink)

The two most antagonistic schools in contemporary Western philosophy are Existentialism and Logical Positivism. They have nothing in common but the name of philosophy, and even that they deny each other. There is some kind of discussion going on between even such distant schools as Pragmatism and neo-Thomism; Existentialists and Logical Positivists have nothing but sarcasms for each other. To philosophers familiar only with the Anglo-Saxon scene Existentialism must appear negligible. In the Mediterranean countries, on the other (...) hand, where philosophy is a much more popular pastime, Existentialism has an unparalleled vogue and Logical Positivism is considered a horrible aberration from the naturally speculative course of philosophy. In South America whose philosophical life we are apt to underrate Logical Positivism seems to be known to almost nobody, whereas Existentialism, mostly in its German and anti-religious shape, has become, quite paradoxically, the rallying point of “Liberalism,” liberalism, in Spanish countries, being above all anti-catholicism. Although, ironically enough, both Logical Positivism and modern Existentialism originated in German speaking countries, the split between the two goes vaguely parallel with, and may have found some ready echo in, the different cultural inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races. Hence, the subject of this paper would seem far-fetched to those steeped in their own national tradition. There is, however, a growing consciousness of the “one world” function of philosophy, particularly with regard to Eastern and Western philosophy. Would it not be a prerequisite of this more ambitious enterprise to gain a clear conception about the most radical split in our own contemporary Western philosophy, the split between Logical Positivism and Existentialism? This paper is an attempt to establish a perspective permitting a just evaluation of the two philosophies. (shrink)

The author investigates carnap's rejection of "problems of reality" (both metaphysics and epistemology). This includes a section on positivism and ethics. He concludes that correspondence theories are untenable. (staff).

The subject of this paper is the relation of Logical Positivism to Theology. By “Logical Positivism” I mean the doctrine originated by Dr. Wittgenstein and expounded more at length by Professors Carnap, Schlick, and other members of the Viennese Circle in the periodical calledErkenntnis. The clearest account of it in English is that given by Mr. R. B. Braithwaite in the volume calledCambridge University Studies.

During its hundred-year history, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has undergone a variety of interpretations and explanations. But the significance of this work cannot be limited to an assessment of whether it had an impact on the development of logical positivism or not. Similarly, the reading of Tractatus cannot be reduced to just an ethical or some other readings. This article proposes to study a possible reading of “Tractatus” in terms of legal philosophy, which is based on the relation (...) between facts, values and norms, as well as on how interesting it could be (or would be) for legal philosophy. (shrink)