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 on meaning and analyticity written by Richard Butrick and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Carnap on meaning and analyticity".
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.
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 Carnap and Quine on Analyticity written by Seyed Masoud Moosavi Karimi and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the Carnap-Quine debate on analyticity with the objective of identifying exactly what is at stake. Close scrutiny of Quine's criticism of the definitions of analyticity reveals that most of his objections are convincing only if they are considered in relation to the definitions of analyticity in natural language. Carnap, however, defines analyticity in artificial languages. The dissertation also shows that Carnap can meet the objections to his definitions by using a perspective based within his own philosophy. After examining the presumptions of each party to the debate, the dissertation concludes that the disagreement between Carnap and Quine on the notion of analyticity is rooted in their different approaches to empiricism and that there is nothing said by either philosopher which proves that one approach has ultimate advantages over the other. It is thus impossible to identify a winner in the Carnap-Quine debate on analyticity. The process of arriving at this conclusion starts with a discussion in the first three chapters of Carnap's philosophy followed by a critical and detailed discussion of his syntactical and semantical definitions of analyticity and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Chapter Four examines Quine's objections to Carnap's definitions of essential predication and shows that his objections do not undermine Carnap's definitions of this notion in artificial languages. It also shows how vital providing a proper definition of essential predication in natural language is for Carnap's philosophy and examines whether or not he is able to do so. Chapter Five analyzes Quine's objections to Carnap's definitions of logical truth and demonstrates that Carnap is able to respond to all of them when the discussion is situated within his philosophical system. Again, Quine's objections to definitions of logical truth are meaningful only if they are considered in relation to natural language, which is not Carnap's concern. The dissertation concludes by showing that both Carnap and Quine arrived at their conclusions with respect to the nature of logical sentences, based not on the arguments in their debate on analyticity, but on their philosophical considerations regarding the principle of empiricism: for Carnap, logical sentences are out of the realm of knowledge and independent of matters of fact whereas, for Quine, these are as empirical as other sentences. Nothing either says in their debate can convince the other to accept a different viewpoint.
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 Analyticity written by Cory Juhl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-11 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyticity, or the 'analytic/synthetic' distinction is one of the most important and controversial problems in contemporary philosophy. In this outstanding introduction to analyticity Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis provide a clear and thorough survey of the problem.
Download or read book Analyticity written by Cory Juhl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-11 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyticity, or the 'analytic/synthetic' distinction is one of the most important and controversial problems in contemporary philosophy. It is also essential to understanding many developments in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. In this outstanding introduction to analyticity Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis cover the following key topics: The origins of analyticity in the philosophy of Hume and Kant Carnap's arguments concerning analyticity in the early twentieth century Quine's famous objections to analyticity in his classic 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' essay The relationship between analyticity and central issues in metaphysics, such as ontology The relationship between analyticity and epistemology Analyticity in the context of the current debates in philosophy, including mathematics and ontology Throughout the book the authors show how many philosophical controversies hinge on the problem of analyticity. Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms making the book ideal to those coming to the problem for the first time.
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 Dear Carnap Dear Van written by Rudolf Carnap and published by University of California Presson Demand. This book was released on 1990 with total page 484 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. Dear Carnap, I enclose a copy of a paper which I am ready to send off for publication. . . . I am anxious to have you look this over as soon as possible, to see whether you have reason to suppose the system contradictory: for it looks dangerous. Dear Quine: I read your paper very carefully and with the highest interest. . . . So far, I do not see any contradiction in the system itself . . . but I share your feeling that the whole looks rather dangerous. 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. Dear Carnap, I enclose a copy of a paper which I am ready to send off for publication. . . . I am anxious to have you look this over as soon as possible, to see whether you have reason to suppose the system contradictory: for it looks dangerous. Dear Quine: I read your paper very carefully and with the highest interest. . . . So far, I do not see any contradiction in the system itself . . . but I share your feeling that the whole looks rather dangerous.
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 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 Quine A Guide for the Perplexed written by Gary Kemp and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-06-23 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willard Van Orman Quine is one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. This work offers an analysis of his writings and ideas in those areas of philosophy to which he contributed. It sets his work in its intellectual context, illuminating his connections to Russell, Carnap and logical positivism.
Download or read book Analyticity written by Anthony Paul O'Grady and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Companion to W V O Quine written by Gilbert Harman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion brings together a team of leading figures in contemporary philosophy to provide an in-depth exposition and analysis of Quine’s extensive influence across philosophy’s many subfields, highlighting the breadth of his work, and revealing his continued significance today. Provides an in-depth account and analysis of W.V.O. Quine’s contribution to American Philosophy, and his position as one of the late twentieth-century’s most influential analytic philosophers Brings together newly-commissioned essays by leading figures within contemporary philosophy Covers Quine’s work across philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, ontology and metaphysics, epistemology, and more Explores his work in relation to the origins of analytic philosophy in America, and to the history of philosophy more broadly Highlights the breadth of Quine’s work across the discipline, and demonstrates the continuing influence of his work within the philosophical community
Download or read book Questions of Form written by Joëlle Proust and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions of Form was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In Questions on Form, Joelle Proust traces the concept of the analytic proposition from Kant's development of the notion down to its place in the work of Rudolf Carnap, a founder of logical empiricism and a key figure in contemporary analytic philosophy. Using a method known in France as topique comparative,she provides a rigorous exposition of analyticity, situating it within four major philosophical systems—those of Kant, Bolzano, Frege, and Carnap—and clearly delineating its development from one system to the next. Proust takes as her point of departure Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. Though she makes clear that Kant drew on Locke, Hume, and Leibniz, she argues that his notion of analyticity was innovative, not simply an elaboration of something already found in their work. She shows that the analytic proposition unexpectedly (given its modest status in Kant) came to play an important part in efforts to convert problems considered "transcendental" into questions of belonging to formal logic. Ultimately, her comparison of their systems reveals that the concept of the analytic, however specific its rile in each, remains linked to a foundationalist strategy—in effect, to the transcendentalist questions Kant used when he reinterpreted the findings of his empiricist predecessors. Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.
Download or read book The Themes of Quine s Philosophy written by Edward Becker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willard Van Orman Quine's work revolutionized the fields of epistemology, semantics and ontology. At the heart of his philosophy are several interconnected doctrines: his rejection of conventionalism and of the linguistic doctrine of logical and mathematical truth, his rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation and his thesis of the inscrutability of reference. In this book Edward Becker sets out to interpret and explain these doctrines. He offers detailed analyses of the relevant texts, discusses Quine's views on meaning, reference and knowledge, and shows how Quine's views developed over the years. He also proposes a new version of the linguistic doctrine of logical truth, and a new way of rehabilitating analyticity. His rich exploration of Quine's thought will interest all those seeking to understand and evaluate the work of one of the most important philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.
