Carnap and Cassirer suspended above Davos

A gem from Peter Gordon’s Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos:

. . . a twenty-two year old student named Ernst Benz. . . recalled many years afterward that, in the afternoon following one of Heidegger’s lectures, a handful of the guests decided to take in the local scenery by riding the cable car that ascended from the valley of Davosplatz to the high, snow-covered peak of the Jakobshorn.  Pressed together in the cabin and swaying slightly as it rose were a number of professors and students, including both Cassirer and Carnap.  Cassirer turned to his neighbor: “Herr Kollege,” he asked, “How would you express the content of today’s lecture by Herr Heidegger in the language of mathematical logic?” And Carnap responded: “Quite simple: Bi-ba-bum!” (p. 327)

Gordon focuses on Carnap’s sardonic reply, which he speculates might allude to Christian Morgenstern’s Heine-esque little Bim, Bam, Bum (I seem to recall Carnap using those syllables somewhere else — perhaps the 1932 psychology paper?), but it seems to me that Cassirer’s question is at least as mischievous as Carnap’s answer.

Treasure trove of Carnap photos

Thanks to Erika Carnap-Thost, Carnap’s granddaughter, I was able to borrow and digitize a large number of her family photos, some dating way back (there are pictures of Carnap’s parents, sister, relatives and many other people, as well as later family snapshots from the 60s in California).  There is some overlap between this collection and the even larger one at the Pittsburgh archive (this part, i.e. Boxes 22 and 23, of the Carnap papers there has not yet been made available online), but I’m not sure which copy of the photos in this overlap is an original — if either — or even how extensive the overlap is.  With a few exceptions, the negatives appear to be lost. Continue reading

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