(This is the first of several posts that will try to catch up on a few bits of Carnap-related news over the past year or so. Most of you will already know about most of it; these catching-up posts will mainly be of interest to those who, like me, were too busily focused to pay attention to the wider world.)
A few years ago, I mentioned here that there would be an issue of the Monist on Carnap’s metaphilosophy. Quite a number of people responded to the cfp and sent things in; the result was published last October. Thanks go especially to Fraser MacBride, the editor of the Monist, who helped a great deal, not only with general day-to-day guidance, but specifically with the suggestion that I translate a couple of the early Carnap texts I was writing about at the time and include them in the issue, especially since their originals are about to be published in a conference volume edited by Christian Damböck, Günter Sandner, and Meike Werner (Logical Empiricism, Life Reform, and the German Youth Movement, Springer, forthcoming). These translations were Carnap’s first contributions to the Monist.
When I first went about putting the issue together, the centerpiece was to have been a synthesis by Bill Demopoulos of his various writings on Carnap over the previous decade (mostly collected in his Logicism and its Philosophical Legacy, CUP 2013), in which he intended to spell out the general perspective on Carnap implicit in many of those pieces. I was very much looking forward to this (I disagreed with Bill, around the edges, but it was a very productive sort of disagreement) — but it was never written, alas, as Bill had the effrontery to die before he could get down to work on it. Thanks to Fraser (again) and all the contributors for ensuring that despite this devastating blow, the issue still came together amazingly well; details in my introduction. My own contribution to it, as well as Huw Price’s reply, can be found here.
That seems like a great collection of articles, I’ll definitely try to get my hands on this issue.
On a tangential note, since you mentioned the matter of translations of Carnap’s early texts, are you aware of any english translation of *Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit*? Unfortunately, my studies of German are quite belated, so reading the manuscript from the scans at the Pitt archives isn’t really an option.
This forthcoming 14-volume edition of Carnap’s collected works is restricted, unfortunately, to the published works (those listed in the Benson bibliography in the Schilpp volume). Some of Carnap’s earlier unpublished works have been coming out elsewhere, notably Christian Damböck’s project of publishing the whole of Carnap’s diaries up to the year 1935. Damböck is also planning to publish other early Carnap manuscripts, and in fact a volume edited by him and others (see the reference in this very post) is about to publish a number of early manuscripts (though not Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit, which will undoubtedly be published sooner or later, though).