A new project has been launched at the LMU (University of Munich), funded by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (with the Union of German Academies of Science behind it), to put ALL of Carnap’s writings online, published and unpublished, in critical and comprehensively annoted editions. This is obviously a huge and challenging project, and it has been funded accordingly — assuming the project meets its interim goals, the Academy’s funding is assured through 2050. The project, entitled “Rudolf Carnap Digital,” is attached to the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, where I am based; its principals are my co-author Hannes Leitgeb (who btw won the Leibniz Prize last year!), Stephan Hartmann (also at MCMP), and Eckhart Arnold (Bavarian Academy). Christian Damböck (whose successful track record in Carnap-related projects includes the Carnap diaries, whose first installment I reviewed for the HOPOS Journal) will manage the project. Congratulations to everyone involved — it’s taken years (and lots of work) to get us to this point!
A kick-off meeting to launch the project and coordinate with the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Rudolf Carnap was held about a month ago, here in Munich, and many of us who launched that project years ago were there, including Rick Creath, Steve Awodey, and Sandy Zabell. That edition will benefit greatly from the coordination; what it lacked, from the beginning, was a central coordinating organization that could follow up on all the many stages each volume has to go through before publication, and keep things on track. That will now be supplied by this new project, which includes the Complete Works as an outreach module, with English translations for an international scholarly audience, alongside the online critical editions of the original texts in their original languages (mostly German for everything before 1935). Only two volumes of the Complete Works have been published so far; vol. 1 (Early Writings) in 2019 and vol. 7 (the Studies in Semantics) in 2024; expect many more volumes to come out in the next couple of years. I am very encouraged by the first steps.
In addition to the Oxford Complete Works, Meiner Verlag of Hamburg (the publishers of the Philosophische Bibliothek, the green volumes used by all philosophy students in German-speaking Central Europe since it was launched over a century ago) will publish print volumes of the RCD critical editions in German. All in all, this project marks a turning point in the reception of Carnap and logical empiricism in their places of origin. Since they were scattered to the corners of the earth in the 1930s by the Nazis, the logical empiricists have been read and discussed mainly by English-speaking philosophers. At the kickoff meeting last month, though, over half the people in the room were Germans or Austrians. Gradually, almost a century after the publication of the Aufbau, Carnap is becoming part of the philosophical canon in his home country.