Summary |
Rudolf
Carnap (1891-1970) was a German-American philosopher mainly working in logic
and philosophy of science. He began his philosophical career as a neo-Kantian,
and later became a leading figure of the logical empiricism of the Vienna
Circle. Since that time, he considered it as one of the main tasks of
philosophy to “overcome metaphysics” – not simply as an internal philosophical
issue, but also as a contribution of
philosophy to the project of enlightenment and the fight against politically
and morally pernicious ideologies. After his emigration to the United States (1935)
he became one of the best-known representatives of philosophy of science and
analytic philosophy. According to Carnap, the task of philosophy was to
construct linguistic and ontological frameworks that could be used in the
ongoing progress of scientific knowledge. In the last decades of his life he
dedicated a great part of his work in the elaboration of inductive logic. |