Paul Rudolf Carnap (; German: [ˈkaʁnaːp]; 18 May 1891 – 14 September 1970) was a German philosopher and logician who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.
Early life and education
Carnap was born Paul Rudolf Carnap on 18 May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in present-day Wuppertal, Germany. Carnap's father rose from being a poor ribbon-weaver to be the owner of a ribbon-making factory. His mother came from an academic family; her father was an educational reformer and her oldest brother was the archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld. As a ten-year-old, Carnap accompanied Dörpfeld on an expedition to Greece. At 14, Carnap taught himself Esperanto, and he attended the World Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. He would later attend the 1924 Congress in Vienna, where he met his fellow Esperantist Otto Neurath for the first time. Carnap was raised in a profoundly religious Protestant family, but later became an atheist. He began his formal education at the Barmen Gymnasium and the Carolo-Alexandrinum Gymnasium in Jena. From 1910 to 1914, he attended the University of Jena, intending to write a thesis in physics. He also intently studied Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason during a course taught by Bruno Bauch, and was one of the very few students to attend Gottlob Frege's courses in mathematical logic. During his university years, he became enthralled with the German Youth Movement. While Carnap held moral and political opposition to World War I, he served in the German army. After three years of service, he was given permission to study physics at the University of Berlin, 1917–18, where Albert Einstein was a newly appointed professor. In August 1918 Carnap joined the Independent Social Democratic Party and worked as a journalist for left-wing newspapers. He then attended the University of Jena, where he wrote a thesis defining an axiomatic theory of space and time. The physics department said it was too philosophical, and Bruno Bauch of the philosophy department said it was pure physics. Carnap then wrote another thesis in 1921, under Bauch's supervision, on the theory of space in a more orthodox Kantian style, published as Der Raum (Space) in a supplemental issue of Kant-Studien (1922). Frege's course exposed him to Bertrand Russell's work on logic and philosophy, which gave a sense of direction to his studies. He accepted the effort to surpass traditional philosophy with logical innovations that inform the sciences. He wrote a letter to Russell, who responded by copying by hand long passages from his Principia Mathematica for Carnap's benefit, as neither Carnap nor his university could afford a copy of this epochal work. In 1924 and 1925, he attended seminars led by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and continued to write on physics from a logical positivist perspective.
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