The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism

by Edited by Alan Richardson , Thomas Uebel

• ISBN13: 9780521796286
• ISBN10: 0521796288
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

If there is a movement or school that epitomizes analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it is logical empiricism. Logical empiricists created a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, established mathematical logic as a topic in and tool for philosophy, and initiated the project of formal semantics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century gave logical empiricism a central place in the project. The second wave of interpretative accounts was constructed to show how philosophy should progress, or had progressed, beyond logical empiricism. The essays survey the formative stages of logical empiricism in central Europe and its acculturation in North America; discusses its main topics, and achievements and failures, in different areas of philosophy of science; and assesses its influence on philosophy, past, present, and future.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Historical Context of Logical Empiricism
The Vienna Circle: Context, Profile, and Development	p. 13
The Society for Empirical/Scientific Philosophy	p. 41
From "the Life of the Present" to the "Icy Slopes of Logic": Logical Empiricism, the Unity of Science Movement, and the Cold War	p. 58
Logical Empiricism: Issues in General Philosophy of Science
Coordination, Constitution, and Convention: The Evolution of the A Priori in Logical Empiricism	p. 91
Confirmation, Probability, and Logical Empiricism	p. 117
The Structure of Scientific Theories in Logical Empiricism	p. 136
Logical Empiricism And The Philosophy of the Special Sciences
The Turning Point and the Revolution: Philosophy of Mathematics in Logical Empiricism from Tractatus to Logical Syntax	p. 165
Logical Empiricism and the Philosophy of Physics	p. 193
Logical Empiricism and the Philosophy of Psychology	p. 228
Philosophy of Social Science in Early Logical Empiricism: The Case of Radical Physicalism	p. 250
Logical Empiricism and the History and Sociology of Science	p. 278
Logical Empiricism and its Critics
Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and Physicalism: A Reassessment	p. 305
Vienna, the City of Quine's Dreams	p. 332
"That Sort of Everyday Image of Logical Positivism": Thomas Kuhn and the Decline of Logical Empiricist Philosophy of Science	p. 346
Bibliography	p. 371
Index	p. 419
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