Despite a renewed interest in the philosophical prehistory of logical empiricism, several texts by prominent figures such as, e.g., Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach, published in non-standard journals, have escaped the notice of scholars. Here, a hitherto virtually unknown but significant review of Moritz Schlick's influential book Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre [1st ed. 1918] written by Hans Reichenbach in 1919/20 is reprinted together with comments about its background and the later development, relying on and citing from the unpublished correspondence between Schlick and (...) Reichenbach in 1920. Since they later became the leading figures in the so called Vienna and Berlin circles respectively, this episode marks an important stage in the gradual emancipation of scientific philosophy from its Kantian roots. (shrink)

In the late 1930s, a few years before the start of the Second World War, a small number of European philosophers of science emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly perilous situation on the continent. Among the first expatriates were Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, arguably the most influential logical empiricists of their time. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the (...) impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. This second part traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. I show that Reichenbach was quite ignorant about developments in Anglophone philosophy in the first stages of his career but became increasingly focused on the United States from the late 1920s onwards. I reconstruct Reichenbach’s efforts to find a job across the Atlantic and show that some of his English publications—most notably Experience and Prediction—were attempts to change the American narrative about logical empiricism. Whereas U. S. philosophers identified scientific philosophy with the views of the Vienna Circle, Reichenbach aimed to market his probabilistic philosophy of science as a subtler alternative. (shrink)

In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U. S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. This two-part paper reconstructs Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Building on archival material of several key players and (...) institutions, I take some first steps toward answering the question why logical empiricism became so successful in the United States after the War. This first part reconstructs Carnap’s development between 1923, when he first visited New York, and 1936, when he was offered a position at the University of Chicago. I describe Carnap’s first substantive contacts with American philosophers as well as the events leading up to his decision to emigrate. In addition, I argue that some of Carnap’s work from the mid-1930s—in particular “Testability and Meaning”—can be better understood if we take into account his attempts to correct the American narrative about logical positivism and his increasingly desperate efforts to find a position in the United States. (shrink)

The present paper attempts to show that a 1915 article by Erich Kretschmann must be credited not only for being the source of Einstein’s point-coincidence remark, but also for having anticipated the main lines of the logical-empiricist interpretation of general relativity. Whereas Kretschmann was inspired by the work of Mach and Poincaré, Einstein inserted Kretschmann’s point-coincidence parlance into the context of Ricci and Levi-Civita’s absolute differential calculus. Kretschmann himself realized this and turned the point-coincidence argument against Einstein in his second (...) and more famous 1918 paper. While Einstein had taken nothing from Kretschmann but the expression “point-coincidences”, the logical empiricists, however, instinctively dragged along with it the entire apparatus of Kretschmann’s conventionalism. Disappointingly, in their interpretation of general relativity, the logical empiricists unwittingly replicated some epistemological remarks Kretschmann had written before General Relativity even existed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes correspondence between Reichenbach and Einstein from the spring of 1926, concerning what it means to ‘geometrize’ a physical field. The content of a typewritten note that Reichenbach sent to Einstein on that occasion is reconstructed, showing that it was an early version of §49 of the untranslated Appendix to his Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre, on which Reichenbach was working at the time. This paper claims that the toy-geometrization of the electromagnetic field that Reichenbach presented in his note should (...) not be regarded as merely a virtuoso mathematical exercise, but as an additional argument supporting the core philosophical message of his 1928 monograph. This paper concludes by suggesting that Reichenbach’s infamous ‘relativization of geometry’ was only a stepping stone on the way to his main concern—the question of the ‘geometrization of gravitation’. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungEs wird die wechselseitige Beeinflussung Einsteins und Schlicks anhand ihrer ab 1915 erhaltenen Korrespondenz in vier Schwerpunkten untersucht. Schlicks Selbstverständnis als Philosoph wie auch einzelne Themata seines Denkens (wie etwa das der Einfachheit) bildeten sich mit seiner Auseinandersetzung um die Relativitätstheorie Einsteins heraus, deren systematische Explikation durch Schlick auf Einsteins Beifall stieß. Als die Ursache für das Auseinanderdriften beider Denker nach 1925 werden fundamentale Differenzen im Wirklichkeitsverständnis und in der Interpretation des Kausalitätsprinzips aufgewiesen, die beide auch zu komplementären Formen der (...) Wissenschaftsgeschichtsbetrachtung führten. (shrink)

This study reconstructs the 1928–1929 correspondence between Reichenbach and Einstein about the latter’s latest distant parallelism-unified field theory, which attracted considerable public attention at the end of the 1920s. Reichenbach, who had recently become a Professor in Berlin, had the opportunity to discuss the theory with Einstein and therefore sent him a manuscript with some comments for feedback. The document has been preserved among Einstein’s papers. However, the subsequent correspondence took an unpleasant turn after Reichenbach published a popular article on (...) distant parallelism in a newspaper. Einstein directly wrote to the Editorial Board complaining about Reichenbach’s unfair use of off-the-record information. While Reichenbach’s reply demonstrates a sense of personal betrayal at Einstein’s behavior, his published writings of that period point to a sense of intellectual betrayal of their shared philosophical ideals. In his attempts to unify both electricity and gravitation, Einstein had abandoned the physical heuristic that guided him to the relativity theory, to embrace a more speculative, mathematical heuristic that he and Reichenbach had both previously condemned. A decade-long personal and intellectual friendship grew fainter and then never recovered. This study, relying on archival material, aims to revisit the Reichenbach–Einstein relationship in the late 1920s in light of Reichenbach’s neglected contributions to the epistemology of the unified field theory program. Thereby, it hopes to provide a richer account of Reichenbach’s philosophy of space and time. (shrink)

By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach in a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, the paper shows, that not only Einstein and Logical Empiricists came to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but they actually, in their life-long interchange, never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of his “measuring rod objection” against Weyl. Logical (...) Empiricists, though carefully analyzing the Einstein-Weyl debate, tried on the contrary to interpret Einstein’s epistemology of geometry as a continuation of the Helmholtz-Poincaré debate by other means. The origin of the misunderstanding, it is argued, should be found in the failed appreciation of the difference between a “Helmhotzian” and a “Riemannian” tradition. The epistemological problems raised by General Relativity are extraneous to the first tradition and can only be understood in the context of the latter, whose philosophical significance, however, still needs to be fully explored. (shrink)