Rudolf Carnap

Abstract

Abstract Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) was the most important philosopher of the twentieth-century movement known as logical positivism or logical empiricism. He arrived at the University of Vienna as a Privatdozent in 1926 and immediately became active in the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and mathematicians that met regularly to discuss questions in “scientific philosophy”. In June and July of 1928, Carnap gave presentations to the Circle on mathematical logic. Gödel, then in his fourth year of university studies, probably attended those meetings. Later that summer, Gödel read parts of Principia mathematical, and in the fall of 1928, Gödel heard Carnap’s course of lectures on logic at the University. Indeed, in 1975, in answer to an inquiry about the important influences on his becoming interested in problems of completeness, Gödel listed Hilbert and Ackermann 1928, where he found the problem for his doctoral dissertation, and Carnap’s lectures. Carnap circulated to Gödel the manuscript from which his lectures were drawn, the Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik; some remarks in the opening paragraphs of Gödel’s dissertation are references to it.