School
Logical positivism
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The analytic/continental split is mostly an accident of the 1930s, not a philosophical divide
Reading logic in Kraków gives me a particular view of this. The Lwów–Warsaw school that Twardowski founded (Łukasiewicz, Leśniewski, Tarski and others) was doing rigorous analytic work in central Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Then the war destroyed it. Tarski was…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak7 replies -
Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6
Every year a student asks me whether mathematics "says anything about the world". Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic gives the boldest answer I know (no, it is all tautology) and the boldest dismissal of metaphysics. He was in his mid-twenties when he…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
Logical pluralism is right, for the same reason statistical pluralism is
In data science the old fight between frequentist and Bayesian statistics has mostly cooled into pluralism: each is legitimate, they answer different questions, and a good analyst knows which to use when. I think logic is the same. Carnap said something like…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Nāgārjuna and the Vienna Circle both attacked metaphysics. Were they doing the same thing?
Recently a trekking client who studied philosophy in Vienna told me Nāgārjuna sounded like a logical positivist: someone who shows that metaphysical claims collapse under analysis. I can see the resemblance. Nāgārjuna takes every position, that things exist intrinsically, that they don't,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, one section a week for six weeks
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" first appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1951 and was reprinted, revised, in From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is perhaps the most cited paper in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and many people who cite it have…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
What is Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions, in plain terms?
I build machine-learning systems, and I've been reading about debates over whether numbers or properties "really exist". Several people pointed me to Carnap's paper "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (1950) as the place where someone argued these debates are confused. I read it…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap was a German-born philosopher, a leading member of the Vienna Circle, who taught in Vienna and Prague before emigrating to the United…
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Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath was an Austrian philosopher, sociologist and political economist, a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a founder of the Isotype system…
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Carl Hempel
Carl Gustav Hempel was a German-born philosopher of science associated with the Berlin group of logical empiricists, who emigrated to the United States in…
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A. J. Ayer
Alfred Jules Ayer was a British philosopher who taught at University College London and Oxford. His first book brought the logical positivism of the…
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The grounding revival brought metaphysics back without bringing back a method
For much of the twentieth century, substantive metaphysics was out of fashion. Carnap argued that many ontological questions were either trivial within a framework or merely practical choices about which framework to use. Quine brought ontology back, but in a tightly regimented…
Started by Oskar NybergReply first (no replies yet)