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Carnap, Rudolf

From Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to Metaphysics
(1891–1970) A leading German logical positivist ( see logical positivism ). At university. Carnap studied both physics and philosophy. From 1925–36, he was an important participant in the Vienna Circle. In 1936 Carnap emigrated to the United States, where his work in philosophy of science, philosophy of language, modal logic and inductive logic shaped and promoted the absorption of logical positivist ideas into the American philosophical mainstream. In his autobiography (in Schilpp, 1963 , p. 45), Carnap laments the vague, inconclusive character of traditional metaphysics: “most of the controversies in traditional metaphysics appeared to me sterile and useless … I was depressed by disputations in which the opponents talked at cross purposes; there seemed hardly any change of mutual understanding, let alone of agreement, because there was not even a common criterion for deciding the controversy.” This anti-metaphysical animus informs Carnap's two most important books, Der logische…
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Full text Article Rudolf Carnap

From Great Thinkers A-Z
‘A towering figure’ is how W. V. O. Quine , himself one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, described Carnap: ‘I see him as the dominant figure in philosophy from the 1930s onward, as Russell had been in the decades before.’ A German-born philosopher who moved to America in 1935, Rudolf…
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Full text Article Carnap, Rudolf (1891-1970)

From Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion
Carnap acknowledged that as he was growing up in the German towns of Ronsdorf and Barmen he experienced what a positive effect a living religion was having in the lives of his parents and in his own life. That any man embraces some traditional or other form of religion, therefore, in no way…
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Full text Article Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970),

From Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
German-born American philosopher who was a leader of the Vienna Circle, a movement loosely called logical positivism or logical empiricism. He made fundamental contributions to semantics and the philosophy of science, as well as to the foundations of probability and inductive logic. He was a staunch…
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Full text Article Carnap

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate(R) Dictionary Full text Article Biographical Names
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Full text Article VIENNA CIRCLE

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
Founding members of one of the most active intellectual currents that came to be known as Logical Empiricism (or Logical Positivism). Especially: Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Hans Hahn (1879-1934), Otto Neurath (1882-1945), Carl Hempel (1905-97), Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), Moritz Schlick…
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Full text Article Schlick, (Friedrich Albert) Moritz (1882–1936)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
German philosopher, physicist, and founder of the Vienna Circle . Under the influence of the early Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical positivism of the German-born US philosopher and logician Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Schlick concluded that all philosophical problems arise from the inadequacy of…
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Full text Article NON-BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

From The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics
‘Nothing shall come of nothing, speak again.’ Thus advised King Lear to his daughter Cordelia, but like many philosophers before and since, she heeded him not. Controversy over whether ‘nothingness’ really exists can be traced back certainly to the pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece or, to…
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Full text Article LOGIC

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
Greek philosopher To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true. In Great Books of the Western World (Volume 8 ) Metaphysics Book IV, Chapter 7 (p. 531 ) Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Chicago…
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Full text Article Carnap, Rudolf

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(born May 18, 1891, Ronsdorf, Ger.—died Sept. 14, 1970, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.) German-born U.S. philosopher. He earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Jena in 1921. In 1926 he was invited to join the faculty of the University of Vienna, where he soon became an influential member of…
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Full text Article Carnap, Rudolf

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
(kär'näp, –năp), 1891–1970, German-American philosopher. He taught philosophy at the Univ. of Vienna (1926–31) and at the German Univ. in Prague (1931–35). After going to the United States he taught at the Univ. of Chicago (1936–52) and at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles (1954–62). Carnap was…
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