Logical Empiricism, Politics, and Professionalism

Carnap’s Logical Empiricism, Values, and American Pragmatism

Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were considered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted f rom value experiences. About 1930, however, values were banished to the realm of meaningless metaphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict e...

The Mind-Body Problem in the Origin of Logical Empiricism

It is widely held that the current debate on the mind-body problem in analytic philosophy began during the 1950s at two distinct sources: one in America, deriving from Herbert Feigl's writings, and the other in Australia, related to writings by U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart (Feigl [1958] 1967). Jaegwon Kim recently wrote that "it was the papers by Smart and Feigl that introduced the mind-body ...

Helmholtz's Zeichentheorie and Schlick's Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre: Early Logical Empiricism and Its Nineteenth-Century Background Author(s):

The Mind-Body Problem in the Origin of Logical Empiricism: Herbert Feigl and Psychophysical Parallelism

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology

Empiricists are in general rather suspicious with respect to any kind of abstract entities like properties, classes, relations, numbers, propositions, etc. They usually feel much more in sympathy with nominalists than with realists (in the medieval sense). As far as possible they try to avoid any reference to abstract entities and to restrict themselves to what is sometimes called a nominalisti...