Reconsidering logical positivism (Q2716297)

The volume brings together a collection of some of the author's earlier essays on aspects of Logical Positivism. The author contributed to (and partially inaugurated) a new trend in the history and philosophy of science of reappraising this important movement towards a ``scientific world view''. With the reappraisal the author attempts to overcome the stereotyped description of this movement (not least, however, due to programmatic statements by members of the movement) according to which it is a version of philosophical ``foundationalism'' based on a logicist reduction of mathematics to logic and a justification of the concepts of empirical science on the base of immediate data of sense (cf.\ pp.\ 2-5). According to the standard picture Logical Positivism can also be understood as an \textit{empiricist} epistemology being close to the philosophy of the British empiricists (p.\ 5). Against this views the author stresses the important role of non-empirical principles, axioms and conceptions convincingly showing that this direction continued staying close to some aspects of Kantianism despite of its sometimes harsh criticism of Kant and the neo-Kantian movement. In sum we find nine papers in three parts. The first part on ``Geometry, relativity, and convention'' contains a review of Moritz Schlick's ``Philosophical papers'', (pp.\ 17-34), with a postscript on ``General relativity and \textit{General theory of knowledge}'' (pp.\ 34-43), papers on ``Carnap and Weyl on the foundation of geometry and relativity theory'' (pp. 44-58), ``Geometry, convention, and the relativized a priori: Reichenbach, Schlick, and Carnap'' (pp. 59-70), and ``Poincaré's conventionalism and the logical positivism'' (pp. 71-86) [cf. Zbl 0854.01027, Zbl 0949.83501]. Part 2 is devoted to Rudolf Carnap's ``Der logische Aufbau der Welt'' [Zbl 0916.01025, JFM 54.0060.03]. It contains the two papers ``Carnap's \textit{Aufbau} reconsidered'' (pp.\ 89-113) and ``Epistemology in the \textit{Aufbau}'' (pp.\ 114-152), with a postscript on ``Carnap and the Neo-Kantians'' (pp.\ 152-162). The last part is entitled ``Logico-mathematical truth''. It contains the three papers ``Analytic truth in Carnap's \textit{Logical syntax of language}'' (pp.\ 165-176), ``Carnap and Wittgenstein's \textit{Tractatus}'' (pp.\ 177-197), and ``Tolerance and analyticity in Carnap's philosophy of mathematics'' (pp.\ 198-233).