Thanks to Christian Damböck, who has a multi-year grant for this purpose from the Austrian government, Carnap’s diaries (up to 1935) — long inaccessible, and only recently open to the public — have now all been transcribed from Carnap’s Stolze-Schrey shorthand.   They will eventually be published in some form, perhaps with other early documents.  A first draft is available here; Christian would like people to have a look and write him with suggestions (or even just guesses) to identify names or suggest possible alternative readings where something doesn’t seem to make sense.  When I was working on early Carnap, these were still sequestered; I had to make do with some faded xeroxes of xeroxes of excerpts (only from the late 20s and early 30s) that were making the rounds for years.  I can’t wait to read the real thing!

Carnap’s shorthand is not just a standard off-the-shelf system.  It is based on Stolze-Schrey, but he used hundreds of personalized abbreviations of his own, which can only be learned by long experience of trial and error.  So learning to read it is hard, and I have to admit that even after a lot of practice, I find it slow going.  I’ve had a look at some of these diaries in shorthand, and they are often hard to puzzle out.  Even with the occasional gap here and there I’m very impressed at the thoroughness and completeness of the job the transcribers have done.  They are Brigitte Parakenings at the University of Konstanz, who has helped me with various transcriptions over the years, including the first draft of Carnap’s “Versuch einer Metalogik” (the germ of the Logical Syntax), and Brigitta Arden at the University of Pittsburgh, who has also helped me with a number of transcriptions, most recently with some difficult bits of Carnap’s 1958 fragment on “Value Concepts” which will shortly be published in Georg Schiemer’s special issue of Synthese on Carnap.  Thanks to them also, of course, for doing the actual work!