Reconsidering Logical Positivism

In this collection of essays one of the preeminent philosophers of science writing offers a reinterpretation of the enduring significance of logical positivism, the revolutionary philosophical movement centered around the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 30s. Michael Friedman argues that the logical positivists were radicals not by presenting a new version of empiricism (as is often thought to be the case) but rather by offering a new conception of a priori knowledge and its role in empirical knowledge. This collection will be mandatory reading for any philosopher or historian of science interested in the history of logical positivism in particular or the evolution of modern philosophy in general.

• Major author writing on key topic in the history of 20th-century philosophy • Non-technical so will be accessible to a broad range of philosophers • Success of Coffa book, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap suggests that we can do well with this book

Preface; Introduction; Part I. Geometry, Relativity, and Convention: 1. Moritz Schlick’s Philosophical Papers; Postscript: general relativity and General Theory of Knowledge; 2. Carnap and Weyl on the foundations of geometry and relativity theory; 3. Geometry, convention, and the relativized a priori: Reichenbach, Schlick and Carnap; 4. Poincaré’s conventionalism and the logical positivists; Part II. Der Logische Aufbau der Welt: 5. Carnap’s Aufbau reconsidered; 6. Epistemology in the Aufbau; Postscript: Carnap and the Neo-Kantians; Part III. Logico-Mathematical Truth: 7. Analytic truth in Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language; 8. Carnap and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; 9. Tolerance and analyticity in Carnap’s philosophy of mathematics; Bibliography; Index.