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Brief Lives


Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)


Alistair MacFarlane looks at the possibilities of a logical life.


Rudolf Carnap has a major place in the history of analytic philosophy. He was entranced by the promise that Bertrand Russell’s and A.N. Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1912) seemed to hold out for creating a logical foundation for mathematics, and by extension, philosophy. He was even more excited by Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), in which Russell called for a reconstruction of all knowledge on the basis of our sense experiences alone, and urged a search for the narrowest selection of basic concepts needed for this purpose.


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