Logical positivism
Logical positivism (later referred to as
logical empiricism,
rational empiricism, or
neo-positivism) is a philosophy that combines
positivism—which states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge—with a version of
apriorismâ€"the notion that some
propositional knowledge can be had without, or "prior to", experience.
Logical positivism denied the soundness of
metaphysics and traditional philosophy, and affirmed that statements about metaphysics, religion and ethics are devoid of cognitive meaning and thus nothing but expression of feelings or desires; only statements about mathematics, logic and natural sciences have a definite meaning.
Logical positivism originated in the
Vienna Circle in the 1920s, where
Rudolf Carnap,
Otto Neurath, and others (see
Philosophers associated with logical positivism in this article) divided meaningful statements into those which are analytic (true a priori), and those which are synthetic (verified by sensory experience, a posteriori) - this was perhaps presaged by
Hume's fork. Logical positivism refuted synthetic a priori knowledge: an evident criticism to
Kantian philosophy.
Logical positivism holds that philosophy should aspire to the
rigor of
science. Philosophy should provide strict criteria for judging sentences true, false, and meaningless.
Although the logical positivists held a wide range of beliefs on many matters, they were all interested in science and skeptical of
theology and
metaphysics. Following
Ludwig Wittgenstein, many held the
correspondence theory of truth, although some, like Neurath, held the
coherence theory of truth. They believed that all knowledge should be based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. Hence, many logical positivists supported forms of
realism,
materialism,
philosophical naturalism, and
empiricism.
Logical positivism is perhaps best known for the
verifiability criterion of meaning, which asserts that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. One intended consequence of the verification criterion is that all non-empirical forms of discourse, including
ethics and
aesthetics, are not "literally" or "cognitively" meaningful, and thus belong to "
metaphysics".
The logical positivists were very much influenced by and were great admirers of the early work of Wittgenstein (from the period of the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). Wittgenstein himself was not a logical positivist, although he was on friendly terms with many members of the
Vienna Circle while in Vienna, especially fellow aristrocrat
Moritz Schlick. Wittgenstein's influence is evident in the formulation of the
verifiability principle. See for example
Proposition 4.024 of the
Tractatus, where Wittgenstein asserts that we understand a proposition when we know what happens if it is true, and compare it with Schlick's assertion that "The definition of the circumstances under which a statement is true is perfectly 'equivalent' to the definition of its meaning". Wittgenstein also influenced the logical positivists' interpretation of
probability.
However, Wittgenstein's relations were not entirely amicable after he left Vienna. Wittgenstein worked mostly in cooperation for nearly a decade with Circle member
Friedrich Waismann, to impose form and structure on his often
oracular utterances, using him as a secretary and speaking of cooperating on a book with him. When Waismann came to
Cambridge in 1937, Wittgenstein barely acknowledged him.
Not all logical positivists' reactions to the
Tractatus were positive: according to Neurath, it was full of metaphysics. Carnap (in his autobiography in
The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap) said that Wittgenstein's influence on the Vienna Circle was overestimated. Moreover, Wittgenstein did not take part in the Vienna Circle's discussions; there were separate meetings between him, Schlick, Carnap and Waismann, but soon Carnap was not admitted to those meetings.
Logical positivism was essential to the development of early
analytic philosophy. It was disseminated throughout the European continent and, later, in American universities by the members of the Vienna Circle.
A.J. Ayer is considered responsible for the spread of logical positivism to Britain. The term subsequently came to be almost interchangeable with "analytic philosophy" in the first half of the twentieth century. Logical positivism was immensely influential in the
philosophy of language and represented the dominant
philosophy of science between
World War I and the
Cold War. Many subsequent commentators on "logical positivism" have attributed to its proponents a greater unity of purpose and creed than they actually shared, overlooking the complex disagreements among the logical positivists themselves.
An important objective pursued by logical positivism is "unified science"; that is, the construction of a "constitutive system" in which every legitimate
statement is reduced to the
concepts of a lower level which refer directly to a given
experience. A number of publications over a period of thirty years would attempt to elucidate this concept.
Einheitswissenschaft (Unified Science)
The Vienna Circle published a collection called
Einheitswissenschaft (
Unified Science)â€"edited by
Rudolf Carnap,
Philipp Frank,
Hans Hahn,
Otto Neurath,
Jorgen Jorgensen (after Hahn's death) and
Charles Morrisâ€"the aim of which was to present a
unified vision of science. The collection was dismissed, after the publication of several
monographies, because of the problems arising from
World War II. The list of philosophers and scientists who contributed to these works is impressive. The complete list of contributors is given here for the historical record.
Einheitswissenschaft (
Unified Science), edited by Carnap, Frank, Hahn, Neurath, Jorgensen (after Hahn's death), and Morris (from 1938):
*
Hans Hahn,
Logik, Mathematik und Naturerkennen, 1933
*
Otto Neurath,
Einheitswissenschaft und Psychologie, 1933
*
Rudolf Carnap,
Die Aufgabe der Wissenschaftlogik, 1934
*
Philipp Frank,
Das Ende der mechanistischen Physik, 1935
*
Otto Neurath,
Was bedeutet rationale Wirtschaftsbetrachtung, 1935
*
Otto Neurath,
E. Brunswik, C. Hull, G. Mannoury, J. Woodger,
Zur Enzyklopädie der Einheitswissenschaft. Vorträge, 1938
*
Richard von Mises,
Ernst Mach und die empiristische Wissenschaftauffassung, 1939These works are translated in
Unified Science: The Vienna Circle Monograph Series, originally edited by Otto Neurath:, Kluwer, 1987.
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science
In 1938 the publication of the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science started under the auspice of logical positivists. It was an ambitious project, and never completed. Only the first section,
Foundations of the Unity of Sciences, was published; it contained two volumes, for a total of twenty monographs published from 1938 to 1969:
*
Otto Neurath,
Niels Bohr,
John Dewey,
Bertrand Russell,
Rudolf Carnap,
Charles Morris,
Encyclopedia and unified science, 1938, vol.1 n.1
*Charles Morris,
Foundations of the theory of signs, 1938, vol.1 n.2
*
Victor Lenzen,
Procedures of empirical sciences, 1938, vol.1 n.5
*
Rudolf Carnap,
Foundations of logic and mathematics, 1939, vol.1 n.3
*
Leonard Bloomfield,
Linguistic aspects of science, 1939, vol.1 n.4
*
Ernest Nagel,
Principles of the theory of probability, 1939, vol.1 n.6
*
John Dewey,
Theory of valuation, 1939, vol.2 n.4
*
Giorgio De Santillana and
Egdard Zilsel,
The development of rationalism and empiricism, 1941, vol.2 n.8
*Otto Neurath,
Foundations of social sciences, 1944, vol.2 n.1
*
Joseph Henri Woodger,
The technique of theory construction, 1949, vol.2 n.5
*
Philipp Frank,
Foundations of physics, 1946, vol.1 n.7
*
Erwin Frinlay-Freundlich,
Cosmology, 1951, vol.1 n.8
*Jorgen Jorgensen,
The development of logical empiricism, 1951, vol.2 n.9
*
Egon Brunswik,
The conceptual framework of psychology, 1952, vol.1 n.10
*
Carl Hempel,
Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science, 1952, vol.2 n.7
*
Felix Mainx,
Foundations of biology, 1955, vol.1 n.9
*
Abraham Edel,
Science and the structure of ethics, 1961, vol.2 n.3
*
Thomas Kuhn,
The structure of scientific revolutions, 1962, vol.2 n.2
*
Gherard Tintner,
Methodology of mathematical economics and econometrics, 1968, vol.2 n.6
*
Herbert Feigl and
Charles Morris,
Bibliography and index, 1969, vol.2 n.10
Perhaps the most famous work published in the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science is
Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However, every entry in the encyclopedia is of substantial scientific and philosophical value.
Monographs on the Scientific World-Conception
A third collection was published by the Vienna Circle from 1928 to 1937. This collection was entitled
Schriften zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung (
Monographs on the Scientific World-Conception), and was edited by Schlick and Frank. Scientists and philosophers such as
Karl Popper contributed. The contributors and monographs were:
*
Richard von Mises,
Wahrscheinlichkeit, Statistik und Wahrheit, 1928 (
Probability, Statistics, and Truth, New York: MacMillan Company, 1939)
*
Rudolf Carnap,
Abriss der Logistik, 1929
*
Moritz Schlick,
Fragen der Ethik, 1930 (
Problems of Ethics, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1939)
*
Otto Neurath,
Empirische Soziologie, 1931
*
Philipp Frank,
Das Kausalgesetz und seine Grenzen, 1932 (
The Law of Causality and its Limits, Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer, 1997)
*
Otto Kant,
Zur Biologie der Ethik, 1932
*Rudolf Carnap,
Logische Syntax der Sprache, 1934 (
The Logical Syntax of Language, New York: Humanities, 1937)
*
Karl Popper,
Logik der Forschung, 1934 (
The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York: Basic Books, 1959)
*
Josef Schächeter,
Prolegomena zu einer kritischen Grammatik, 1935 (
Prolegomena to a Critical Grammar, Dordrecht; Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1973)
*
Victor Kraft,
Die Grundlagen einer wissenschaftliche Wertlehre, 1937 (
Foundations for a Scientific Analysis of Value, Dordrecht; Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1981)
There is an extensive list of philosophers who are associated to some degree with logical positivism.
*The physicist and philosopher
Moritz Schlick, one of the first philosophers interested in the
theory of relativity. He taught at the
University of Vienna, where he held the chair of theory of inductive science. In Vienna, he organized the discussion group known as the Vienna Circle. Schlick can be regarded as the father of logical positivism, both for his organizational skills and for his philosophical ideas. He formulated the
verifiability principle.
*
Rudolf Carnap, one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century, a leading exponent of logical positivism, and co-author of the Vienna Circle manifesto. He made contributions to the
philosophy of science, the
philosophy of language, the theory of
probability, and classical, inductive and modal
logic. Since ordinary language is ambiguous, Carnap asserted the necessity to study philosophical issues in artificial languages, governed by the rules of
logic and
mathematics. In such languages he dealt with problems like the meaning of a
statement, the distinction between
analytic and
synthetic,
a priori and
a posteriori,
necessity and
contingency, the different interpretations of
probability, and the nature of
explanation. Carnap taught at the
University of Prague, the
University of Vienna, the
University of Chicago,
Harvard University, and the
University of California at Los Angeles.
*The philosopher of science
Herbert Feigl, who encouraged
Karl Popper to write the book
Logik der Forschung. His 1931 article with A. E. Blumberg, "Logical Positivism: A New Movement in European Philosophy" in
The Journal of Philosophy, was one of the first reports on logical positivism published in the United States, and promoted the spread of logical positivism. He taught at the
University of Iowa and at the
University of Minnesota, where in
1953 he founded the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, the oldest center for the
philosophy of science in the world.
*The physicist
Philipp Frank, a student of
David Hilbert and
Ludwig Boltzmann, who was an editor of the series
Monographs on the Scientific World-Conception and
Unified Science; he contributed to the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science with the 1946 work "Foundations of physics".. He taught at Harvard University and wrote about the
theory of relativity.
*The logician and mathematician
Kurt Gödel, who proved the completeness of
first-order logic and the
incompleteness of formal arithmetic. Gödel also worked on
set theory and non-classical logics, such as
intuitionistic logic and
modal logic. He proved that the
continuum hypothesis is consistent with the axioms of classical set theory. He was interested in the mathematical aspects of the
theory of relativity, and proved the existence of solutions of
Einstein's relativistic equations in which time travel to the past is possible.
*The mathematician
Hans Hahn, co-author of the Vienna Circle manifesto, who taught at
Innsbruck,
Bonn and
Vienna; among his students there were
Karl Popper and
Kurt Gödel.
*The philosopher and sociologist
Otto Neurath, who played an important role in the development of logical positivism. He was co-author of the manifesto of the Vienna Circle (it is supposed that he was indeed the principal author), planned and directed the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, was an editor of the journal
Erkentnnis and of the series
Unified Science, and founded and directed the International Foundation for Visual Education.
*The philosopher
Friedrich Waismann, who was one of the few members of the Vienna Circle admitted to the meetings with
Wittgenstein. He taught philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science at the
University of Cambridge and at the
University of Oxford.
Germany and the Berlin Circle
In Germany, members of the
Berlin Circle contributed in an essential way to the development of logical positivism:
*The physicist and philosopher
Hans Reichenbach, the founder of the
Berlin Circle. He studied with
Albert Einstein,
Arnold Sommerfeld,
Ernst Cassirer,
David Hilbert,
Max Planck, and
Max Born. He is one of the fathers of the frequency interpretation of
probability. He taught physics at Technische Hochschule in
Stuttgart, philosophy of physics at the
University of Berlin; he was chief of the department of philosophy at the
University of Istanbul; he taught philosophy at the
University of California at Los Angeles. He wrote about the philosophical meaning of the
theory of relativity, which he studied under the teaching of
Albert Einstein, and
quantum mechanics.
*The logician and philosopher
Kurt Grelling, a victim of
Nazism; it is supposed that he died with his wife in the
Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, although it also has been reported that Grelling was killed in 1941 at the border between
France and
Spain while he was trying to escape in Spain. Grelling was a teacher in secondary school and was interested in logical problems. A semantic paradox is named after him, the
Grelling paradox, formulated in 1908] by Grelling and
Leonard Nelson. Grelling collaborated with
Kurt Gödel and in 1936 he published an article in which he defended Gödel's theorem of incompleteness against an erroneous interpretation, according to which Gödel's theorem is indeed a paradox like Russell's paradox.
*The philosopher
Carl Gustav Hempel, a leading member of logical positivism. He studied philosophy with
Hans Reichenbach, physics with
Max Planck, logic with
von Neumann and mathematics with
David Hilbert. He taught in
New York, at the
City College and at
Queens College. Later, Hempel taught at
Yale University, at
Princeton University and, well on in years, he continued in teaching at the
University of California at Berkeley and
Irvine, the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the
University of Pittsburgh. He contributed to the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. He is well-known for his studies on the logic of
confirmation and
explanation.
Scandinavia
*As early as 1930
Scandinavian philosophers were interested in logical positivism. Two of them, Swedish
Ake Petzäll and Finnish
Eino Kaila, employed for the first time the expression "logical neopositivism" for denoting the new philosophical movements (A. Petzäll,
Der logistische Neupositivismus, 1930; and E. Kaila, "Der logistische Neupositivismus" in
Annales Universitatis Aboensis, 1930). Petzäll was mainly influenced by the Vienna Circle and in 1930 or 1931 he went to Vienna, where he took part in theVienna Circle's meetings. Later he founded a new journal,
Theoria, published in
Göteborg; in that journal
Hempel published his very first description of the paradoxes of confirmation (
Le problème de la vérité, 1937).
Eino Kaila published in 1939 a work pervaded by the principles of logical positivism (
The human knowledge, in Finnish). He taught philosophy at the
University of Helsinki. Among his students was
George Henrik von Wright, who published a study about logical positivism (
The Logical Empiricism, 1943, in Finnish). Wright contributed to the development of
modal logic and
deontic logic. Finn
Jaakko Hintikka, who had Wright as a teacher, pursued Carnap's studies on inductive logic. Hintikka's article "A two-dimensional continuum of inductive methods" in
Aspects of inductive logic (eds. J. Hintikka and P. Suppes, 1966), extended the methods Carnap used in
The Continuum of Inductive Methods, 1952.
*Danish philosopher
Jorgen Jorgensen very actively collaborated with neopositivists. After Hans Hahn's death in 1934, Jorgensen became an editor of the Vienna Circle's series
Unified Science; later he collaborated on the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, to which he contributed the 1951 essay
The Development of Logical Empiricism.
United Kingdom
*English philosopher
Alfred Jules Ayer played an important role in the spread of logical positivism. His 1936 work
Language, Truth and Logic gained immediate success. In that book, he completely accepted both the
verifiability principle and the distinction between
analytic and
synthetic statements; hence he asserted that metaphysical sentences are meaningless.
Poland
*Logical positivism had extensive contacts with the group of Polish logicians who developed several branches of contemporary
logic. Polish philosophy was greatly influenced by
Kazimierz Twardowski, who studied at the
University of Vienna and taught at
Lwow; he is the founder of Polish
analytic philosophy. He taught several Polish philosophers and logicians. Among them were:
**
Jan Lukasiewicz, who developed both the
algebra of logic and many-valued
propositional calculus, which influenced Carnap's
inductive logic and
Reichenbach's interpretation of
quantum mechanics, in which Reichenbach employed a three-valued propositional calculus. He contributed to
Erkenntnis, the journal of logical positivism, edited by Carnap and Reichenbach.
**
Stanislaw Lesniewski, who was interested in the logical antinomies.
**
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, who taught
philosophy of language,
epistemology and
logic, and contributed to
Erkenntnis.
**
Tadeusz Kotarbinski, who asserted that many alleged philosophical problems in fact are scientific problems, i.e. they are the object of empirical science and not of philosophy, which deals with logical and ethical problems only.
*The Polish logician
Alfred Tarski, who developed the theory of
semantics in
formal language, took part in the congresses on scientific philosophy organized by the Vienna and Berlin Circles; he greatly influenced Carnap's philosophy of language. Carnap was interested in logical
syntax but, after the publication of Tarski's works, he turned to
semantics.
Early critics of logical positivism said that its fundamental tenets could not themselves be formulated in a way that was clearly consistent. The
verifiability criterion of meaning did not seem verifiable; but neither was it simply a logical
tautology, since it had implications for the practice of science and the empirical truth of other statements. This presented severe problems for the logical consistency of the theory. Another problem was that, while positive existential claims ("there is at least one human being") and negative universals ("not all ravens are black") allow for clear methods of verification (find a human or a non-black raven), negative existential claims and positive universal claims do not allow for verification.
Universal claims could apparently never be verified: How can you tell that
all ravens are black, unless you've hunted down every raven ever, including those in the past and future? This led to a great deal of work on induction, probability, and "confirmation", which combined verification and falsification.
Karl Popper, a well-known critic of logical positivism, published the book
Logik der Forschung in 1934 (translated by himself as
The Logic of Scientific Discovery published 1959). In it he presented an influential alternative to the verifiability criterion of meaning, defining scientific statements in terms of
falsifiability. First, though, Popper's concern was not with distinguishing meaningful from meaningless statements, but distinguishing "scientific" from "metaphysical" statements. He did not hold that metaphysical statements must be meaningless; neither did he hold that a statement that in one century was "metaphysical" while unfalsifiable (like the ancient Greek philosophy about
atoms), could not in another century become "falsifiable" and thus "scientific". About psychoanalysis he thought something similar: in his day it offered no method for falsification, and thus was not falsifiable and not scientific. However, he did not exclude it being
meaningful, nor did he say psychoanalysts were necessarily "wrong" (it only couldn't be proven either way: that would have meant it was falsifiable), nor did he exclude that one day psychoanalysis could evolve into something falsifiable, and thus "scientific". He was, in general, more concerned with scientific practice than with the logical issues that troubled the positivists. Second, although Popper's philosophy of science enjoyed great popularity for some years, if his criterion is construed as an answer to the question the positivists were asking, it turns out to fail in exactly parallel ways. Negative existential claims ("there are no unicorns") and positive universals ("all ravens are black") can be falsified, but positive existential and negative universal claims cannot.
Logical positivists' response to the first criticism is that logical positivism is a philosophy of science, not an
axiomatic system that can prove its own consistency (see
Gödel's incompleteness theorem). Secondly, a
theory of language and
mathematical logic were created to answer what it really means to make statements like "all ravens are black".
A response to the second criticism was provided by
A. J. Ayer in
Language, Truth and Logic, in which he sets out the distinction between "strong" and "weak" verification. "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience." (Ayer 1946:50) It is this sense of verifiable that causes the problem of verification with negative existential claims and positive universal claims. However, the weak sense of verification states that a proposition is "verifiable... if it is possible for experience to render it probable" (ibid.). After establishing this distinction, Ayer goes on to claim that "no proposition, other than a
tautology, can possibly be anything more than a probable
hypothesis" (Ayer 1946:51), and therefore can only be subject to weak verification. This defense was controversial among logical positivists, some of whom stuck to strong verification, and claimed that general propositions were indeed nonsense.
Subsequent philosophy of science tends to make use of the better aspects of both of these approaches. Work by
W. V. O. Quine and
Thomas Kuhn has convinced many that it is not possible to provide truth conditions for science independent of its historical paradigm. But even this criticism was not unknown to the logical positivists: Otto Neurath compared science to a boat which we must rebuild on the open sea.
*Achinstein, Peter and Barker, Stephen F.
The Legacy of Logical Positivism: Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.
*Ayer, Alfred Jules.
Logical Positivism. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959.
*Barone, Francesco.
Il neopositivismo logico. Roma Bari: Laterza, 1986.
*Bergmann, Gustav.
The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. New York: Longmans Green, 1954.
*Cirera, Ramon.
Carnap and the Vienna Circle: Empiricism and Logical Syntax. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994.
*Edmonds, David & Eidinow, John;
Wittgenstein's Poker, ISBN 0066212448
*Friedman, Michael,
Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
*Gadol, Eugene T.
Rationality and Science: A Memorial Volume for Moritz Schlick in Celebration of the Centennial of his Birth. Wien: Springer, 1982.
*Geymonat, Ludovico.
La nuova filosofia della natura in Germania. Torino, 1934.
*Giere, Ronald N. and Richardson, Alan W.
Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
*Hanfling, Oswald.
Logical Positivism. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1981.
*Jangam, R. T.
Logical Positivism and Politics. Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1970.
*Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen.
Wittgenstein's Vienna. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
*Kraft, Victor. The Vienna Circle:
The Origin of Neo-positivism, a Chapter in the History of Recent Philosophy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1953.
*McGuinness, Brian.
Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Trans. by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979.
*Mises von, Richard.
Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.
*Parrini, Paolo.
Empirismo logico e convenzionalismo: saggio di storia della filosofia della scienza. Milano: F. Angeli, 1983.
*Parrini, Paolo; Salmon, Wesley C.; Salmon, Merrilee H. (ed.)
Logical Empiricism - Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
*Reisch, George.
How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science : To the Icy Slopes of Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
*Rescher, Nicholas.
The Heritage of Logical Positivism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.
*Salmon, Wesley and Wolters, Gereon (ed.),
Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, University of Konstanz, 21-24 May 1991, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.
*Sarkar, Sahotra.
The Emergence of Logical Empiricism: From 1900 to the Vienna Circle. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
*Sarkar, Sahotra.
Logical Empiricism at its Peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
*Sarkar, Sahotra.
Logical Empiricism and the Special Sciences: Reichenbach, Feigl, and Nagel. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
*Sarkar, Sahotra.
Decline and Obsolescence of Logical Empiricism: Carnap vs. Quine and the Critics. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
*Sarkar, Sahotra.
The Legacy of the Vienna Circle: Modern Reappraisals. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
*Spohn, Wolfgang (ed.),
Erkenntnis Orientated: A Centennial Volume for Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
People
*
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz*
Alfred Jules Ayer*
Richard Bevan Braithwaite*
Rudolf Carnap*
Herbert Feigl*
Philipp Frank*
Kurt Gödel*
Kurt Grelling*
Hans Hahn*
Carl Gustav Hempel*
Tadeusz Kotarbinski*
Thomas Kuhn*
Stanislaw Lesniewski*
Jan Lukasiewicz*
Ernest Nagel*
Otto Neurath*
Karl Raimund Popper*
Hans Reichenbach*
Moritz Schlick*
Alfred Tarski*
Kazimierz Twardowski*
Friedrich Waismann*
Ludwig WittgensteinInstitutions
*
Berlin Circle*
Vienna CircleOther philosophical movements
*
Positivism*
Sociological positivismAbout logical positivism
*
Feigl, Herbert. 'Positivism in the Twentieth Century (Logical Empiricism)', Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 1974, Gale Group (Electronic Edition)*
Kemerling, Garth. 'Logical Positivism', Philosophy Pages*
Murzi, Mauro. 'Logical Positivism', The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Tom Flynn (ed.). Prometheus Books, forthcoming (PDF version)*
Murzi, Mauro. 'The Philosophy of Logical Positivism'*
Passmore, John. 'Logical Positivism', The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards (ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1967, first edition*
Shalizi, Cosma Rohilla. 'Logical Positivism'*
Logical positivismAbout philosophical subjects pertinent to logical positivism
*
Hájek, Alan. 'Interpretations of Probability', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)*
Rey, Georges. 'The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)*
Ryckman, Thomas A., 'Early Philosophical Interpretations of General Relativity', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)*
Woleński, Jan. 'Lvov-Warsaw School', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)*
Woodward, James. 'Scientific Explanation', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
