SPACE - CARNAP'S FIRST PUBLICATION

CARNAP, RUDOLF.

Der Raum. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre.

Berlin, Reuther & Reichard, 1922. 8vo. Uncut in the original grey printed wrappers w. very neat professional repairs to inner hinges and to capitals. Printing on spine nearly fully intact. A very faint waterstaining to upper corner throughout, otherwise a very good, nice and clean copy of a publication, which in itself is quite fragile. 87 pp.

First edition of Carnap's first publication, his doctoral dissertation. Printed in Kant-Studien, Ergänzungshefte, Nr. 56. Issued by H. Vaihinger, M. Frischeisen-Kähler and A Liebert.

Rudolf Carnap (born 1891 in Ronsdorf, Germany, died 1970 in Santa Monica, California) was an immensely influential analytic philosopher, who has contributed decisively to the fields of logic, epistemology, semantics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. He was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle, and a prominent logical positivist. He studied philosophy, physics and mathematics at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg, and worked at the universities of Jena, Vienna and Prague until 1935, when he, due to the war, emigrated to the U.S., where he became an American citizen in 1941. In America he became professor of the University of Chicago.
In Jena he was appointed Professor of Mathematics, though his main interest at that time was in physics. By 1913 he planned to write his dissertation on thermionic emission, but this was interrupted by World War I, where he served at the front until 1917. Afterwards he studied the theory of relativity under Einstein in Berlin, and he developed the theory for a new dissertation, namely on an axiomatic system for the physical theory of space and time. He thus ended up writing the important dissertation under the direction of Bouch on the theory of space (Raum) from a philosophical point of view. The dissertation was submitted in 1921, and, due to the clear influence from Kantian philosophy, it was published the following year in this supplement to the "Kant-Studien".
After the publication of his first work, Carnap's involvement with the Vienna Circle began to develop. He met Reichenbach in 1923 and was introduced to Moritz Schlick in Vienna, where he then moved to become assistant professor at the university. He soon became one of the leading members of the Vienna Circle, and in 1929 he, Neurath, and Hahn wrote the manifest of the Circle.

As the title indicates, "Der Raum" deals with the philosophy of space. Partly influenced by Husserl, under whom he studied at Freiburg, Carnap poses the question whether our knowledge of space is analytic, synthetic a priori or empirical. His answer is that it depends on what is meant by "space", and thus differentiates between three kinds of theories of space: Formal (which is analytic [a priori]), intuitive (which is synthetic a priori), and physical (which is empirical [or synthetic aposteriori]). He compares this division of space with that of geometry into: projective, metric and topological. This, of course, anticipates much of his later philosophy, and some of his theories developed in this paper became the official position of logical empiricism on the philosophy of space. In this work he also develops a formal system for space-time topology, which became quite influential.

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