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Complete Works of Rudolf Carnap

Finally!  We are now ready to announce officially that the complete published works of Rudolf Carnap, in 14 volumes, first signed by Open Court Publishing Company (of glorious memory) with the Carnap descendants in 2002, will now be published, beginning next year, by Oxford University Press.  An overview of the volumes (and other details) is available at the new website for the project, courtesy of Richard Zach.  The first volume to appear will, appropriately, be volume 1, sometime (early, I hope) next year.  Then there will be three or four per year for the next four to five years; there are bound to be stragglers.

Many thanks especially to Richard Creath for initiating this with me back in the good old twentieth century, when everything seemed possible, and for all the other editors for sticking with it for so long (or joining forces with us belatedly) through so many difficult ups and (too often) downs: Steve Awodey, Bernd Buldt,  Michael Friedman, Greg Frost-Arnold, Gottfried Gabriel, Warren Goldfarb, Wolfgang Kienzler, Hannes Leitgeb, Sebastian Lutz, Erich Reck, Alan Richardson, Tom Ricketts, Georg Schiemer, Dirk Schlimm, Sven Schlotter, Thomas Uebel, Pierre Wagner, Sandy Zabell, and Richard Zach.

About ten years ago Open Court held a launch party for the edition at a PSA in Pittsburgh; I remember there was a lot of wine.  We also had about 50 copies of a bound galley proof of volume 1 for people to look at.  We tried to keep track of them but inevitably (with all the wine) most of them wandered off.  It looked enough like a real book to fool many people into thinking it was the actual volume 1 of the edition (and it isn’t actually that far from what the final volume 1 will look like).  I’ve encountered references to it as a published book in the literature.  I mention this so that those who are in possession of one of these 50 premature bound galley proofs will hang on to them, even if they’re falling apart (as bound galleys inevitably do); they will certainly become collector’s items.

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