Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap was a German-American philosopher and logician, and a leading member of the Vienna Circle, the group of scientifically minded philosophers that developed logical positivism in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. In his 1928 book Der logische Aufbau der Welt, translated as The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap attempted to construct all meaningful concepts of science and everyday experience out of a base of immediate sense experience using the tools of formal logic, a landmark project in twentieth-century epistemology. Carnap championed the principle of tolerance, the view that philosophers should be free to choose and construct different logical languages or frameworks for science rather than argue over which single framework is metaphysically correct, and he applied this pluralism throughout his later work on the logical syntax and semantics of scientific language. After emigrating from Nazi Germany in 1935, Carnap held professorships at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, and his later work on inductive logic and the analysis of scientific language shaped the philosophy of science throughout the mid-twentieth century.