Tuboly (A.T.) | Carnap Blog

We all know, meanwhile, about the productivity gap that has opened up between academics (and lots of others) who have children at home full time because the schools have been closed and those who don’t. I’m pretty sure it’s worse for the children than it is for us, on the whole, but anyway, I’m on the wrong side of that divide. Nonetheless, I’ve managed to squeeze out a few bits and pieces over the past year or so.

For Thomas Uebel’s forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Logical Empiricism, I wrote a shorter and snappier and more accessible version of “Carnapian Rationality” (I’ve noticed that other contributors have had their chapters online for years).

For Jordi Cat and Adam Tuboly’s huge new Neurath Reconsidered, I contributed a chapter on Neurath’s notorious disagreement with Carnap about semantics. The book has the terrific feature that it reprints the entire wartime (1940-45) Neurath-Carnap correspondence, in which that disagreement largely played out, so I was able to refer to it very conveniently. (The correspondence is on pp. 521-685, which I point out here since it doesn’t appear in the Table of Contents. Very mysterious that the publishers should choose deliberately to hide their light under a bushel.)

In the forthcoming issue of the Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, on “The Vienna Circle and Religion” (edited by Esther Ramharter), I put together an English version of things I’ve published in German in the past few years to trace the origins of Carnap’s later non-cognitivism. Teaser: it turns out that in the beginning (before 1914) the religious writings of Johannes Müller played a major role; Kant came later — and (Rickert’s) Goethe seems to have played a key role in the transition from Müller to Kant.

Last week I went to a rather interesting little conference in Budapest organized by Ádám Tamás Tuboly at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Given its focus on “sociological” aspects of logical empiricism, most of the papers were focussed on Philipp Frank (about whom I learned a lot) and Neurath (about whom I learned even more, though I knew a lot more about him than Frank to begin with). I was a little surprised at the neglect of Richard von Mises, an outsider I’ve always found very attractive, especially in this connection, and especially of Felix Kaufmann. Neither, admittedly, belongs to either of the two notorious “parties” of the Left or Right Vienna Circles, so both are somewhat lonely eccentrics on the fringe. But then so is Wittgenstein (though of course he’s a much bigger name than either Mises or Kaufmann), to whom Martin Kusch devoted a superb paper focussing on the intellectual context of Wittgenstein’s many remarks on color and color perception, showing in detail how some, at least, of Wittgenstein’s ideas were formed in response to the experimental psychology he encountered in Cambridge when he was a student there before the First World War. Continue reading →