Question for any Carnap experts out there...

[dgswaim]

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to start with respect to Carnap and Carnap scholarship? Lately I've been working through some of the neo-Kantian philosophy of science literature (e.g. Michael Friedman, Hermann Cohen, etc.), and it would be nice to get a better hold on what's going on with Carnap as it relates to this stuff. My intuition is that one doesn't just dive into something like the Aufbau and expect much good to come of it. Any suggestions as to how best to wet one's feet on his stuff would be wonderful.

[Griswald]

My advice would be to dive in! Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" is a classic and should be less intimidating than the Aufbau, though I'd also encourage you to not be afraid of the latter. You might find the SEP articles on the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism helpful too.

[overoverover]

I'd read the Aufbau, perhaps supplemented by Alan Richardson's book (the only monograph on Carnap I know of, but I've heard good things).

The Cambridge Companion to Carnap is nice too.

[dgswaim]

I jogged over to the library and decided to pick up a copy of the Aufbau. Seems manageable enough thus far.

[Cecinestpasunphilosophe]

Cohen! I read his Religion of Reason last semester. Fascinating stuff. How's your German? So much of his work is untranslatable - I think working on Cohen was the first time I encountered an important modern voice who was almost entirely untranslated into English, which was a terribly frustrating experience.

[dgswaim]

Cohen! I read his Religion of Reason last semester. Fascinating stuff. How's your German? So much of his work is untranslatable - I think working on Cohen was the first time I encountered an important modern voice who was almost entirely untranslated into English, which was a terribly frustrating experience.

My German is pretty touchy. It's something I need to work on more after I finish my MA and start my PhD work. Late 19th and early 20th century philosophy of science in Germany was amazingly fertile. As it stands now I'm mostly at the mercy of translators, but it is a long-term goal to fix that problem.

[Cecinestpasunphilosophe]

My German is pretty touchy. It's something I need to work on more after I finish my MA and start my PhD work. Late 19th and early 20th century philosophy of science in Germany was amazingly fertile. As it stands now I'm mostly at the mercy of translators, but it is a long-term goal to fix that problem.

 

And by untranslatable, my sleep-deprived mind of course meant untranslated. To my knowledge, only Religion of Reason and some excerpts from other essays of his are available in English. What have you been reading of his work?

[isostheneia]

Chalmers's latest book is supposed to do something like offering a defense/update for contemporary philosophy of Carnap's basic project in the Aufbau. I haven't read it, but I'm not optimistic about his interpretive skills. (As in, his points may be well argued, but I have little faith that they bear much resemblance to what Carnap is actually getting at.)

 

For more bad history by Chalmers, see his "Hegelian Argument" in "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism."

[overoverover]

Chalmers sees himself as vindicating something in the spirit to the Aufbau, but I don't think he'd be bothered by charges of poor interpretation. Same with Amie Thomasson—she has a new book I just picked up, Ontology Made Easy, where she argues for a deflated view of ontological disputes and puts forward an interpretation of Carnap, but if you told her that wasn't really what Carnap was saying, she'd probably just say "Fine, but my view is independently interesting." And she'd be right!

[dgswaim]

And by untranslatable, my sleep-deprived mind of course meant untranslated. To my knowledge, only Religion of Reason and some excerpts from other essays of his are available in English. What have you been reading of his work?

Sections of Religion of Reason, but a lot of what I'm getting is also through Cassirir and others writing about Cohen's neo-Kantianism, and looking through their sources. The stuff that's in German I squint at and do my best to glean insight.

[isostheneia]

Chalmers sees himself as vindicating something in the spirit to the Aufbau, but I don't think he'd be bothered by charges of poor interpretation. Same with Amie Thomasson—she has a new book I just picked up, Ontology Made Easy, where she argues for a deflated view of ontological disputes and puts forward an interpretation of Carnap, but if you told her that wasn't really what Carnap was saying, she'd probably just say "Fine, but my view is independently interesting." And she'd be right!

 

I agree that he wouldn't be bothered by these charges. I just think that, if one is on board with the general project, deviations from the details require attention to why the details aren't quite right, and such attention is really only possible through careful interpretation. It seems that he takes the overall project to be much more separable from the details than I do. Of course, when you're at NYU, I suppose you're granted a bit of leeway with these things.

[Monadology]

My romantic partner recently read Chalmer's latest book as a part of her proseminar. They started with the Aufbau, then moved on to Chalmers' book and stopped partway through because the consensus was that it was not very good (the professor had not read it before). The impression that I got was that they though it was not very good on its own terms (i.e. philosophically), I didn't hear much about what they thought of it as an interpretation of Carnap.