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122Der junge Carnap in historischem Kontext: 1918-1935 / Young Carnap in an Historical Context: 1918–1935 (edited book)Springer. forthcoming.Im Zentrum dieses Bandes stehen die Beiträge einer Tagung, die im Oktober 2017 an der Universität Konstanz stattgefunden hat. Thema der Tagung war ein den historischen Kontext einbeziehender Blick auf den frühen Rudolf Carnap, vom Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Emigration Ende 1935. Der 1891 in Ronsdorf bei Wuppertal geborene Rudolf Carnap entschloss sich erst relativ spät zu einer Karriere als akademischer Philosoph, nämlich 1920, nachdem er sein durch den Krieg unterbrochenes Studium der P…Read more
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10Ways of the Scientific World-Conception. Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath (edited book)BRILL. 2024.Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and Otto Neurath (1882-1945) decisively determined the development of the scientific world view of logical empiricism. The contributions to this volume illuminate from different perspectives the intricate relations between these two key thinkers.
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6Review: Meike G. Werner (Ed.), Ein Gipfel für Morgen. Kontroversen 1917/18 um die Neuordnung Deutschlands auf Burg Lauenstein, Wallstein Verlag 2021 (review)In Paola Cantù & Georg Schiemer (eds.), Logic, Epistemology, and Scientific Theories – From Peano to the Vienna Circle, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 321-324. 2023.In 1917/18 the German publisher Eugen Diederichs organized three “closed meetings” at Lauenstein castle in Upper Franconia (Germany) where about 60 representatives of science, art, and “the youth” discussed “the meaning and purpose of our time.” (273) The present volume delivers the definitive documentation of these historically important meetings. At the same time, it brings together three different sources, carefully selected, edited, and introduced by Meike Werner.
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43Descriptive Psychology and Völkerpsychologie—in the Contexts of Historicism, Relativism, and NaturalismHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10 (1): 226-233. 2020.
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23The Politics of Carnap’s Non-Cognitivism and the Scientific World-Conception of Left-Wing Logical EmpiricismPerspectives on Science 30 (4): 493-524. 2022.. Based on a reconstruction of the development of Rudolf Carnap’s views from the Aufbau until the 1960s, this paper provides an account of the philosopher’s understanding of non-cognitivism, which is here seen as in line with the so-called scientific world-conception of left-wing logical empiricism. The starting point of Carnap’s conception is the claim that every human decision depends on certain attitudes that cannot be justified at a cognitive level, that are neither based on empirical facts …Read more
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4Die Entwicklung von Carnaps Aufbau 1920–1928In Christian Damböck & Gereon Wolters (eds.), Der Junge Carnap in Historischem Kontext: 1918–1935 / Young Carnap in an Historical Context: 1918–1935, Springer Verlag. pp. 19-53. 2021.Der logische Aufbau der Welt wurde 1928 publiziert, zwei Jahre nachdem Carnap sich in Wien mit dem Manuskript des Buches habilitiert hatte. Entstanden ist Carnaps Buch jedoch in einer Zeit, in der dieser noch nicht in Wien tätig war. Die Niederschrift erfolgte im Jahr 1925 in Buchenbach bei Freiburg; die Vorgeschichte reicht zurück bis ins Jahr 1920. Wie viel Wien oder Wiener Kreis steckt also eigentlich im Aufbau? Wie sehr spiegelt der Aufbau umgekehrt die philosophische Situation in Carnaps fr…Read more
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706Der Junge Carnap in Historischem Kontext: 1918–1935 / Young Carnap in an Historical Context: 1918–1935 (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2021.This Open Access volume is based on the 'Early Carnap in Context’ workshop that took place in Konstanz in 2017 and looks at Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy, documented in his recently released diaries, from a combination of historical, cultural and philosophical perspectives. It enables further evaluation of the diaries and traces newly found interrelationships and their systematic definition. From a cultural and historical point of view, Logical Empiricism and Carnap’s pivotal opus, The Logical Stru…Read more
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32The Socio-Ethical Dimension of Knowledge: The Mission of Logical Empiricism (edited book)Springer. 2021.This book studies how the relationship between philosophy, morality, politics, and science was conceived in the Vienna Circle and how this group of philosophers tried to position science as an antidote to totalitarianism and irrationalism. This leads to investigation of the still understudied views of the Vienna Circle on moral philosophy, meta-ethics, and the relationship between philosophy of science and politics. Including papers from an international group of scholars, The Socio-ethical Dime…Read more
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(Dis-) Similarities: Remarks on “Austrian” and “German” Philosophy in the Nineteenth CenturyIn Denis Fisette, Guillaume Fréchette & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), Franz Brentano and Austrian Philosophy, Springer. pp. 169--180. 2020.In this paper, I re-examine Barry Smith’s list of features of Austrian Philosophy in his Austrian philosophy. The legacy of Franz Brentano. Open Court, Chicago, 1994). I claim that the list properly applies only in a somewhat abbreviated form to all significant representatives of Austrian Philosophy. Moreover, Smith’s crucial thesis that the features of Austrian Philosophy are not shared by any German philosopher only holds if we compare Austrian Philosophy to a canonical list of German Philosop…Read more
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39What Is Descriptive Psychology?Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10 (1): 274-289. 2020.This article reevaluates Hermann Ebbinghaus’s famous criticisms of Wilhelm Dilthey’s 1894 essay “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” to determine how Dilthey’s diverse approaches toward philosophy and the human sciences are related to experimental psychology and to hypothetico-deductive science. It turns out that Ebbinghaus falsely accuses Dilthey of rejecting experimental psychology overall, while, in fact, Dilthey rejects only a specific misuse of experimental psychology: as a wa…Read more
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21Philosophie Und Wissenschaft Bei Hermann Cohen/Philosophy and Science in Hermann Cohen (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2018.Der Band versammelt einen Großteil der Beiträge, die internationale Experten anlässlich der Tagung „Philosophie und Wissenschaft bei Hermann Cohen“ im November 2014 am Institut Wiener Kreis der Universität Wien präsentiert haben. Mit der Tagung zu Hermann Cohen, der zusammen mit Paul Natorp die Marburger Schule begründete, wurden zwei Ziele verfolgt: erstens die Aspekte in der Philosophie des Kantianers Cohen herauszuarbeiten, die an die Idee einer Einheitswissenschaft anknüpfen und zweitens Div…Read more
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9„Was vernünftig ist, ist eine Insel“ Zu Dieter Adelmanns Dissertation über Hermann Cohen1Zeitschrift für Religions- Und Geistesgeschichte 66 (1): 1-31. 2014.
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Erratum to: Influences on the AufbauIn Christian Damböck (ed.), Influences on the Aufbau, Springer Verlag. 2016.
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31Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston, eds. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 202. $25.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (1): 154-156. 2017.
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60Rudolf Carnap and Wilhelm Dilthey:“German” Empiricism in the AufbauIn Richard Creath (ed.), Rudolf Carnap and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism, Springer Verlag. pp. 67--88. 2012.Rudolf Carnap’s formative years as a philosopher were his time in Jena where he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy, among others, with Gottlob Frege, the neo-Kantian Bruno Bauch, and Herman Nohl, a pupil of Wilhelm Dilthey.2 Whereas both the influence of Frege and of the neo-Kantians is quite well known,3 the importance of the Dilthey school for Carnap’s intellectual development was recently highlighted by scholars, such as Gottfried Gabriel and Hans-Joachim Dahms.4 Although Carnap him…Read more
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113Kuhn’s notion of scientific progress: “Reduction” between incommensurable theories in a rigid structuralist frameworkSynthese 191 (10): 2195-2213. 2014.In the last two sections of Structure, Thomas Kuhn first develops his famous threefold conception of the incommensurability of scientific paradigms and, subsequently, a conception of scientific progress as growth of empirical strength. The latter conception seems to be at odds with the former in that semantic incommensurability appears to imply the existence of situations where scientific progress in Kuhns sense can no longer exist. In contrast to this seeming inconsistency of Kuhns conception, …Read more
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33Rudolf Carnap and Wilhelm Dilthey: “German” Empiricism in the AufbauVienna Circle Institute Yearbook 16 67-88. 2012.Rudolf Carnap’s formative years as a philosopher were his time in Jena where he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy, among others, with Gottlob Frege, the neo-Kantian Bruno Bauch, and Herman Nohl, a pupil of Wilhelm Dilthey.2 Whereas both the influence of Frege and of the neo-Kantians is quite well known,3 the importance of the Dilthey school for Carnap’s intellectual development was recently highlighted by scholars, such as Gottfried Gabriel and Hans-Joachim Dahms.4 Although Carnap him…Read more
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309Die hier zusammengefassten statistischen Daten waren ursprünglich als Teil meiner Habilitationsschrift "〈Deutscher Empirismus〉. Studien zur Philosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum 1830-1930" (erscheint 2016 oder 2017 bei Springer) gedacht. In der Endfassung des Manuskripts wurden diese Daten jedoch nicht mehr im Detail aufgenommen, weil sich herausgestellt hat, dass eine plausible Interpretation dieses Materials den Rahmen meiner Arbeit bei weitem sprengen und umfangreiche zusätzliche Recherchen e…Read more
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57Theory structuralism in a rigid frameworkSynthese 187 (2): 693-713. 2012.This paper develops the first parts of a logical framework for the empirical sciences, by means of a redefinition of theory structuralism as originally developed by Joseph Sneed, Wolfgang Stegmüller, and others, in the context of a ‘rigid’ logic as based on a fixed (therefore rigid) ontology. The paper defends a formal conception of the empirical sciences that has an irreducible ontological basis and is unable, in general, to provide purely structural characterizations of the domain of a theory.…Read more
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43Caught in the Middle: Philosophy of Science between the Historical Turn and Formal Philosophy as Illustrated by the Program of “Kuhn Sneedified”Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 4 (1): 62-82. 2014.This article is concerned with the development of philosophy of science in the 1970s. The explanatory framework is the picture of two fundamental split-offs: the controversial establishment of history and sociology of science and of formal philosophy of science as independent disciplines, against the background of more traditional “conceptual” varieties of philosophy of science. I illustrate these developments, which finally led to somewhat “purified” versions of the respective accounts, by exam…Read more
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