Leitgeb Offers an "Untimely Review" of the Aufbau

Topoi has a fun series of "untimely reviews" of classic works in philosophy commissioned with the following aim: "We take a classic of philosophy and ask an outstanding scholar in the same field to review it as if it had just been published. This implies that the classical work must be contrasted with both past and current literature and must be framed in the wider cultural context of the present day."

Hannes Leitgeb has carried this off with great panache with the Aufbau. The opening paragraph sets the tone:

Philosophy is facing a serious crisis, but no one cares. When
German Idealism, Existentialism, and Marxism allied with
Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Cultural History, and Literature
Studies in the early 20th century, all attempts at conducting
philosophy in a style similar to that of the scientists got
expelled from the High Church of Philosophy. The creation
of the Wykeham Professorship in Hermeneutics (formerly:
Logic) at Oxford and the Stanford Chair of Textual Non-
Presence (formerly: Methodology of Science) are wellknown
indicators of these, by now, historical developments.
The best philosophical work since then is to be found in the
history of philosophy—if one is lucky. One cannot help but
wondering what turn philosophy would have taken if
someone had picked up the revolutionary developments in
logic and mathematics in the 1920s and directed them
towards philosophy. Maybe there would still be logic
courses in philosophy departments? Who knows?

Here's hoping that some more classics of analytic philosophy get similar treatments soon!

Richardson on Carus on Carnap

Richardson has a review in NDPR of Carus' recent book on Carnap. It is fairly sympathetic, but I think it strikes the right note of skepticism about Carus' attempts to extract an Enlightenment project from Carnap's work that will not only rescue some notion of explication in the service of clarifying scientific knowledge, but will also relate scientific knowledge to normative disputes in ethics and politics. As I read the book, Carus does an excellent job clarifying Carnap's moves towards a defensible picture of explication, but the link to values is still hard to make out. As Richardson puts it,

Carus's book leaves, that is to say, more to be done to specify and implement the project he announces. One can only hope that he continues to work in this vein and to inspire others to do so also. I am not convinced that what is at stake in interpreting Carnap's philosophy is ultimately our Western way of life, but, given the well-known social projects of the Vienna Circle, it would not be surprising if some aspects of interpreting Carnap's project aided in our philosophical understanding of our own social projects. I hope this review has given some indication of the multiple levels on which Carus's book is worth engaging philosophically. The book will be central to the continuing detailed scholarly discussions of Carnap's philosophy. More than this, it will, I hope, help raise to consciousness several larger issues regarding the social import of key projects within analytic philosophy.

An Introduction to Carnap's Aufbau

As promised earlier, here is a draft of a survey article on Carnap's Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau. The article will eventually be submitted to Philosophy Compass. Comments welcome, although please bear in mind that it is hard to summarize 80 years of discussion in 6000 words! Update (May 2012): A comment has drawn my attention to the broken link -- the published version is now online here.

Bleg: Aufbau Literature Since 1990

Here is a preliminary bibliography of places to look for focused discussions of the Aufbau since 1990. I have not always given the titles of papers in a collection if that collection has several different papers.

Suggestions welcome! Please also let me know if you have a view about the most important issues for our understanding and interpretation of the Aufbau. This is for a Philosophy Compass article that I am currently working on.

New Book: Collected Works of Carnap, Vol. 1

One of the best parts of the PSA was the reception hosted by Open Court as part of their launch of the Collected Works of Carnap. The first volume was actually there, and should soon be available for purchase. This volume is perhaps one of the most important as it provides English translations of Carnap's early work for the first time, including his doctoral dissertation. There is an extensive introduction and carefully compiled textual notes.

Real fans of Carnap will like the detailed chronology of Carnap's life. Some things that I never knew before: (i) in WWI, Carnap was initially assigned to the Carpathian mountains because of his skiing ability, (ii) in 1929 Carnap was advised not to publish his paper "On God and the Soul" because "it will make it impossible for him to get a job at a philosophy department anywhere in Germany" (xxxv), and (iii) in 1936 Carnap turned down an offer from Princeton to take up a position at the University of Chicago.

The whole team of editors is to be thanked for their excellent work. Only 12 more volumes left for them to complete!

Vienna and the Vienna Circle

Here are the slides from a presentation I gave in April to the European Studies group at Purdue. The basic point is that a study of the historical context of a philosopher can be essential to understanding the content of their position. One can concede this role to context without thinking that the correctness of one's philosophical views are determined by the context. Extended debate about the importance of context for the history of philosophy has developed out of Soames' book. See here for Soames' various replies to criticisms.