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(with the Union of German Academies of Science behind it), to put ALL of Carnap’s writings online, published and unpublished, in critical and comprehensively annoted editions.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!
Continue readingZabell (S.)
New work on Carnap’s inductive logic
There’s a very interesting paper by Marta Sznajder in the latest Studies in History and Philosophy of Science about Carnap’s late (posthumously published) writings on inductive logic, especially his “Basic System” published by Dick Jeffrey in 1980. She focuses on Carnap’s introduction of “attribute spaces” to give structure to the semantics of the “world” to which properties are attributed; particular observations can be thought of then as points in such an attribute space, whose geometry is determined by the chosen linguistic framework (p. 70). There is an obvious continuity here with the structural characterization of the “world” in the Aufbau, a continuity Sznajder mentions (p. 65) but doesn’t develop. (I do hope someone follows this up soon – another obvious indication of the lifelong continuity, and overall unity, in Carnap’s thought that I am always banging on about!) What she does discuss very interestingly Continue reading