Update: Carnap’s Diaries

Time to revive this blog again at last — after a somewhat excessive post-pandemic interruption — with an update about a recent publication that will interest anyone who’s at all concerned with Carnap or the Vienna Circle: the first two volumes of Carnap’s diaries are now out in book form, published by the Meiner Verlag (the venerable philosophy publisher who issues those green volumes — the Philosophische Bibliothek — that generations of German philosophy students have grown up with). Volume 1 (1908-19) includes all Carnap’s wartime diaries; volume 2 (1920-1935) has all the famous passages about the Vienna Circle in it that are quite familiar from the secondary literature by now, not just the Carnap literature but also adjoining ones about Gödel, Neurath, and on the Vienna Circle more generally. Volumes 3 and 4 (from 1936 through 1970) aren’t out yet, but are on the way.

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Carnap as plagiarist

A new book has just appeared that sets the record straight, and shows that not just Carnap’s ideas, but pretty much the whole of analytic philosophy, are largely derivative of Husserl’s phenomenology.  It is edited, of course, by none other than the redoubtable Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, who has been on the case for quite a while.  It contains, among other papers, the one Haddock himself gave at the Aufbau conference Christian Damböck organized at the MCMP in Munich in 2013.  I’ve mentioned Haddock’s performance there in a previous post.  The published version of his paper does not refer to my paper (which he called “the big lie” in the Munich discussion) or even deign to list it in his bibliography (it’s been out for almost a year, and available online for over 18 months).  Haddock does however — a new addition since the conference — include references to, and even quotations from, the Carnap diary entries I used in my paper (the first time they were referred to in print).  At the Munich conference, he had cast doubt on the authenticity of these passages, implying that I had fabricated them or badly distorted their content.

Haddock has never quite come out and claimed that Carnap stole Husserl’s ideas, though he’s often insinuated it, and hinted darkly at various conspiracies to hide the dirty secret of Husserl’s influence on Carnap.  In this new volume, though, Haddock also includes a long paper by Verena Mayer that takes this step explicitly, right from the title — “Der Logische Aufbau als Plagiat.”   Continue reading

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. Continue reading

Carnap’s Letter about Sweden (1914)

A while ago I made a transcription available of Carnap’s open letter to LeSeur, which I said could in a sense be regarded as his first publication.  Another candidate for that status is this — privately published — letter of 1914 expressing Carnap’s fulsome enthusiasm for Sweden.  It is available among the papers the Archive of Scientific Philosophy (Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh) has put online in box 25, folder 101, pp. 28-31 (of the Carnap papers there).  Here, for convenience, is the Carnap item by itself.  Many thanks to Gottfried Gabriel for bringing this to my attention years ago.

Carnap’s “Politische Rundbriefe” of 1918

When I was putting together my conception of Carnap’s early development, and the wellsprings of his later philosophy, in the first chapter of my book, I relied largely on his manifesto-like article on “Deutschlands Niederlage” (Germany’s Defeat), which was written in October 1918 but remained unpublished.  I knew from the original draft of his autobiography about his effort of earlier that year (February through August) to stimulate discussion among his Youth Movement friends with a series of commented excerpts from the foreign press and from more extended essays (including Kant’s “Vom ewigen Frieden”!), which he continued to circulate and to correspond with individual friends about until he was prohibited by his commander, in September 1918, from further activity; as he remarked in the original version of the autobiography, he was lucky that his superior was so lenient, and that he wasn’t prosecuted for Hochverrat (high treason), since some of those he’d circulated his Rundbriefe to were actually still in action on the western front.

I had also seen the large folders of these Politische Rundbriefe in the Pittsburgh archive, and leafed through them, reluctantly deciding that I simply couldn’t afford the time to study them in detail.  I was wrong. Continue reading

Carnap’s 1916 letter to LeSeur: “Good for us if we glow so intensely!”

In spirit, this document from the Pittsburgh ASP collection, transcribed here from Carnap’s sister’s Sütterlin longhand (the only copy that seems to exist), is something like Carnap’s first publication.  It was an open letter, from the front, responding to a publication in a rather narrow-minded, nationalist-leaning, loosely Youth-Movement-affiliated journal called Vom deutschen Michel (untranslatable, sorry; something like “about the simple, honest German”) by a Berlin minister called Eduard LeSeur.  What steps Carnap, his friends, and his family took to make the letter more widely known I haven’t yet explored; there are probably clues elsewhere in the file where this document is kept, along with LeSeur’s original piece, “Ein Brief an den Jünger der modernen Kultur” (“a letter to the disciple of modern culture”). Continue reading

Carnap gold mine!

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!

Theoretical concepts (audio)

Obviously lots of you found this long before I did (just now), as over a thousand people have listened to it, according to YouTube, but in case a few of you are as slow as I am, and haven’t come across it yet, here is a tape recording of Carnap giving his Santa Barbara APA talk in 1959 — the very talk whose typescript Stathis Psillos published (with a very useful and knowledgeable introduction) a few years ago.  There isn’t much to it that isn’t in the typescript, though of course it’s interesting to hear the author himself reading it, but there’s also the bonus of a few discussion questions at the end (does anyone recognize who’s asking the questions?  if so please write me, or leave a comment!).

Carnap’s architectonic

In the last chapter of my book I tried, far too cryptically, to outline a conception of rationality that had the potential, at least, of doing justice to two desiderata: (a) it would build on what one might call the “Enlightenment rationality” epitomized by inductive logic and (broadly speaking Bayesian) decision theory; (b) it would, however, introduce a broad freedom of choice (“Carnapian tolerance”) regarding the conceptual system in which (a) is undertaken.  These two goals seem at odds, and indeed, this is a conflict which in various forms has haunted the Enlightenment (and scientific rationality in general) from the beginning: die Dialektik der Aufklärung.  And where these goals come into conflict, (a) has generally won out over (b).  This is why science has seemed coercive and authoritarian to so many people; it has seemed like a false religion, and continues to inspire the kind of vituperative rejection Goethe’s polemic against Newton first exemplified two centuries ago. Continue reading

Serious problems of life

Esperanto and artificial languages for everyday communication have been unexpectedly (for me) high profile on this blog; in its short lifetime of about two months, I’ve already devoted three posts to that apparently recondite historical curiosity, one on Carnap and C.K. Ogden, one about Carnap’s application of the principle of tolerance to a practical question, and one on Carnap and Wittgenstein.  The latter consists mainly of a quotation in which Carnap tells the story of a backwoods Black Forest peasant, designed to undermine “the firm conviction that an international auxiliary language might be suitable for business affairs and perhaps for natural science, but could not possibly serve as an adequate means of communication in personal affairs, for discussions of serious problems of life, political conferences, for discussions in the social sciences and the humanities, let alone for fiction or drama.”  Well, a recent commenter on that post, Alexander George, asked the perfectly reasonable question whether Carnap himself actually ever discussed “serious problems of life” in Esperanto. Continue reading

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