Download or read book The Philosophical Project of Carnap and Quine written by Sean Morris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and W. V. O Quine (1908–2000) have long been seen as key figures of analytic philosophy who are opposed to each other, due in no small part to their famed debate over the analytic/synthetic distinction. This volume of new essays assembles for the first time a number of scholars of the history of analytic philosophy who see Carnap and Quine as figures largely sympathetic to each other in their philosophical views. The essays acknowledge the differences which exist, but through their emphasis on Carnap and Quine's shared assumption about how philosophy should be done-that philosophy should be complementary to and continuous with the natural and mathematical sciences-our understanding of how they diverge is also deepened. This volume reshapes our understanding not only of Carnap and Quine, but of the history of analytic philosophy generally.
Download or read book Carnap Tarski and Quine at Harvard written by Greg Frost-Arnold and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reconstruction of the lines of argument used by Carnap, Tarski, and Quine, highlighting their historical significance and contemporary relevance based on Carnap's own notes from his conversations of the time.During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard, holding regular private meetings, with Carnap, Tarski, and Quine. 'Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard' allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall for their conversations. Carnap took detailed notes during his year at Harvard. This book includes both a German transcription of these shorthand notes and an English translation in the appendix section. Carnap's notes cover a wide range of topics, but surprisingly, the most prominent question is: If the number of physical items in the universe is finite, what form should scientific discourse take? This question is closely connected to anabiding philosophical problem: What is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the material realm? Carnap, Tarski, and Quine's attempts to answer this question involve issues central to philosophy today.This book focuses on three such issues: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. In short, the book reconstructs the lines of argument represented in these Harvard discussions, discusses their historical significance (especially Quine's break from Carnap),and relates them when possible to contemporary treatments of these issues.
Download or read book Carnap Quine and Putnam on Methods of Inquiry written by Gary Ebbs and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume critically examines the work of three eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, engaging with and developing their answers to key methodological questions.
Download or read book The Philosophical Project of Carnap and Quine written by Sean Morris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reassesses Carnap and Quine by presenting them as sharing philosophical motivations despite their notable differences.
Download or read book Quine written by Peter Hylton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quine was one of the foremost philosophers of the Twentieth century. In this outstanding overview of Quine's philosophy, Peter Hylton shows why Quine is so important and how his philosophical naturalism has been so influential within analytic philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Quine's philosophical background in logic and mathematics and the role of Rudolf Carnap's influence on Quine's thought, he goes on to discuss Quine's famous analytic-synthetic distinction and his arguments concerning the nature of the a priori. He also discusses Quine's philosophy of language and epistemology, his celebrated theory of the indeterminacy of translation and his broader views of ontology and modality. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Quine, twentieth century philosophy and the philosophy of language.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap written by Rudolf Carnap and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume of the Library of Living Philosophers (LLP) appeared in 1939, the brainchild of the late Professor Paul A. Schilpp. Schilpp saw that it would help to eliminate confusion and endless sterile disputes over interpretation if great philosophers could be confronted by their capable philosophical peers and asked to reply. As well as a number of critical essays with the chosen philosopher's replies to each essay, each volume would include an intellectual autobiography and an up-to-date bibliography The LLP series has exceeded even Schilpp's expectations, enabling great philosophers to do more than clarify by extending and elaborating their thoughts. A volume in the Library of Living Philosophers is not merely a commentary on a philosopher's work; it is a critical part of that work.
Download or read book Dear Carnap Dear Van written by W. V. Quine and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rudolf Carnap and W. V. Quine, two of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, corresponded at length—and over a long period of time—on matters personal, professional, and philosophical. Their friendship encompassed issues and disagreements that go to the heart of contemporary philosophic discussions. Carnap (1891-1970) was a founder and leader of the logical positivist school. The younger Quine (1908-) began as his staunch admirer but diverged from him increasingly over questions in the analysis of meaning and the justification of belief. That they remained close, relishing their differences through years of correspondence, shows their stature both as thinkers and as friends. The letters are presented here, in full, for the first time. The substantial introduction by Richard Creath offers a lively overview of Carnap's and Quine's careers and backgrounds, allowing the nonspecialist to see their writings in historical and intellectual perspective. Creath also provides a judicious analysis of the philosophical divide between them, showing how deep the issues cut into the discipline, and how to a large extent they remain unresolved.
Download or read book Carnap Tarski and Quine at Harvard written by Greg Frost-Arnold and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard: Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, Rudlof Carnap, W. V. Quine, Carl Hempel, and Nelson Goodman were all in residence. This group held regular private meetings, with Carnap, Tarski, and Quine being the most frequent attendees. Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall for their conversations. Carnap took detailed notes during his year at Harvard. This book includes both a German transcription of these shorthand notes and an English translation in the appendix section. Carnap’s notes cover a wide range of topics, but surprisingly, the most prominent question is: if the number of physical items in the universe is finite (or possibly finite), what form should scientific discourse, and logic and mathematics in particular, take? This question is closely connected to an abiding philosophical problem, one that is of central philosophical importance to the logical empiricists: what is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the material realm studied by natural science? Carnap, Tarski, and Quine’s attempts to answer this question involve a number of issues that remain central to philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science today. This book focuses on three such issues: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. In short, the book reconstructs the lines of argument represented in these Harvard discussions, discusses their historical significance (especially Quine’s break from Carnap), and relates them when possible to contemporary treatments of these issues. Nominalism. The founding document of twentieth-century Anglophone nominalism is Goodman and Quine’s 1947 “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism.” In it, the authors acknowledge that their project’s initial impetus was the conversations of 1940-1941 with Carnap and Tarski. Frost-Arnold's exposition focuses upon the rationales given for and against the nominalist program at its inception. Tarski and Quine’s primary motivation for nominalism is that mathematical sentences will be ‘unintelligible’ or meaningless, and thus perniciously metaphysical, if (contra nominalism) their component terms are taken to refer to abstract objects. Their solution is to re-interpret mathematical language so that its terms only refer to concrete entities—and if the number of concreta is finite, then portions of classical mathematics will be considered meaningless. Frost-Arnold then identifies and reconstructs Carnap’s two most forceful responses to Tarski and Quine’s view: (1) all of classical mathematics is meaningful, even if the number of concreta is finite, and (2) nominalist strictures lead to absurd consequences in mathematics and logic. The second is familiar from modern debates over nominalism, and its force is proportional to the strength of one’s commitment to preserving all of classical mathematics. The first, however, has no direct correlate in the modern debate, and turns upon the question of whether Carnap’s technique for partially interpreting a language can confer meaningfulness on the whole language. Finally, the author compares the arguments for and against nominalism found in the discussion notes to the leading arguments in the current nominalist debate: the indispensability argument and the argument from causal theories of reference and knowledge. Analyticity. Carnap, Tarski, and Quine’s conversations on finitism have a direct connection to the tenability of the analytic-synthetic distinction: under a finitist-nominalist regime, portions of arithmetic—a supposedly analytic enterprise—become empirical. Other portions of the 1940-41 notes address analyticity directly. Interestingly, Tarski’s criticisms are more sustained and pointed than Quine’s. For example, Tarski suggests that Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem furnishes evidence against Carnap’s conception of analyticity. After reconstructing this argument, Frost-Arnold concludes that it does not tell decisively against Carnap—provided that language is not treated fundamentally proof-theoretically. Quine’s points of disagreement with Carnap in the discussion notes are primarily denials of Carnap’s premises without argument. They do, however, allow us new and more precise characterizations of Carnap and Quine’s differences. Finally, the author forwards two historical conjectures concerning the radicalization of Quine’s critique of analyticity in the period between “Truth by Convention” and “Two Dogmas.” First, the finitist conversations could have shown Quine how the apparently analytic sentences of arithmetic could be plausibly construed as synthetic. Second, Carnap’s shift during his semantic period toward intensional analyses of linguistic concepts, including synonymy, perhaps made Quine, an avowed extensionalist, more skeptical of meaning and analyticity. Unity of Science. The unity of science movement originated in Vienna in the 1920s, and figured prominently in the transplantation of logical empiricism into North America in the 1940s. Carnap, Tarski, and Quine’s search for a total language of science that incorporates mathematical language into that of the natural and social sciences is a clear attempt to unify the language of science. But what motivates the drive for such a unified science? Frost-Arnold locates the answer in the logical empiricists’ antipathy towards speculative metaphysics, in contrast with meaningful scientific claims. I present evidence that, for logical empiricists over several decades, an apparently meaningful assertion or term is metaphysical if and only if that assertion or term cannot be incorporated into a language of unified science. Thus, constructing a single language of science that encompasses the mathematical and natural domains would ensure that mathematical entities are not on par with entelechies and Platonic Forms. The author explores various versions of this criterion for overcoming metaphysics, focusing on Carnap and Neurath. Finally, I consider an obstacle facing their strategy for overcoming metaphysics: there is no effective procedure to show that a given claim or term cannot be incorporated within a language.
Download or read book Carnap and Twentieth Century Thought written by A. W. Carus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-13 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Germany and later a US citizen, he was a founder of the philosophical movement known as Logical Empiricism. He was strongly influenced by a number of different philosophical traditions (including the legacies of both Kant and Husserl), and also by the German Youth Movement, the First World War (in which he was wounded and decorated), and radical socialism. This book places his central ideas in a broad cultural, political and intellectual context, showing how he synthesised many different currents of thought to achieve a philosophical perspective that remains strikingly relevant in the twenty-first century. Its rich account of a philosopher's response to his times will appeal to all who are interested in the development of philosophy in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Working from Within written by Sander Verhaegh and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a "naturalistic" approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy--the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning--philosophers today largely follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. Sander Verhaegh here offers a comprehensive study of Quine's groundbreaking naturalism. Building on Quine's published corpus as well as a wealth of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, Verhaegh aims to reconstruct both the nature and the development of his naturalism. As such, Working from Within aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. Transcriptions of five unpublished papers, letters, and notes are included in the appendix.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap written by Paul Arthur Schilpp and published by La Salle, Ill. : Open Court ; London : Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1963 with total page 1112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of a series of studies of contemporary philosophers, this volume focuses on Rudolf Carnap.
Download or read book The Logical Structure of the World written by Rudolf Carnap and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available for the first time in 20 years, here are two important works from the 1920s by the best-known representative of the Vienna Circle. In The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap adopts the position of "methodological solipsism" and shows that it is possible to describe the world from the immediate data of experience. In his Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, he asserts that many philosophical problems are meaningless.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science written by Rudolf Carnap and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1995-01-17 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stimulating, thought-provoking text by one of the 20th century's most creative philosophers makes accessible such topics as probability, measurement and quantitative language, causality and determinism, theoretical laws and concepts, more.
Download or read book Decline and Obsolescence of Logical Empiricism written by Sahotra Sarkar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1996 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.
Download or read book Carnap s Construction of the World written by Alan W. Richardson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a major contribution to the history of analytic philosophy in general and of logical positivism in particular. It provides the first detailed and comprehensive study of Rudolf Carnap, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century philosophy. The focus of the book is Carnap's first major work: Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World). It reveals tensions within the context of German epistemology and philosophy of science in the early twentieth century. Alan Richardson argues that Carnap's move to philosophy of science in the 1930s was largely an attempt to dissolve the tension in his early epistemology. This book fills a significant gap in the literature on the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It will be of particular importance to historians of analytic philosophy, philosophers of science, and historians of science.
Download or read book Quine s Philosophy written by Gary Kemp and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W.V. Quine is one of the leading figures of 20th century analytic philosophy, and still among the most influential. But his work can be challenging and complex, and indeed often misunderstood. In this updated introduction to Quine's thought, Gary Kemp examines his seemingly disparate views as a unified whole and offers a valuable guide for anyone approaching Quine for the first time. Informed by current debates and updated throughout, this edition now includes: · Thoroughly revised and expanded text · More references to commentaries, secondary literature and works by Quine · Suggestions for further reading · Newly introduced material on Empirical Content, Explication, Nominalism, The Purported Third Dogma, Theoreticity, Natural Selection and Linguistics. · Historical notes on Quine's relation to his predecessors and contemporaries Paying close attention to Quine's seminal works including Word and Object and Philosophy of Logic, Kemp explains how his philosophy relates to thinkers including Rudolf Carnap and Wittgenstein, as well as to more recent figures such as Donald Davidson and Noam Chomsky. Kemp clearly and accurately emphasizes the systematic nature of Quine's thought as one of naturalism. He advances our understanding of Quine and attests to his ongoing influence in philosophy of science, logic, language, ontology and epistemology. This unique introduction to Quine's philosophy is recommended for any student interested in Quine and the history of analytic philosophy.
Download or read book Ontology After Carnap written by Stephan Blatti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rudolf Carnap's deflationary approach to ontology is once again attracting considerable interest and support. Eleven original essays by leading voices in metametaphysics deepen our understanding of Carnap's contributions to metaontology, and explore how his legacy can be mined for insights into the contemporary debate.