The Young Carnap's Unknown Master

Husserl's Influence on Der Raum and Der logische Aufbau der Welt

Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317011408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Examining the scholarly interest of the last two decades in the origins of logical empiricism, and especially the roots of Rudolf Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World), Rosado Haddock challenges the received view, according to which that book should be inserted in the empiricist tradition. In The Young Carnap's Unknown Master Rosado Haddock, builds on the interpretations of Aufbau propounded by Verena Mayer and of Carnap's earlier thesis Der Raum propounded by Sahotra Sarkar and offers instead the most detailed and complete argument on behalf of an Husserlian interpretation of both of these early works of Carnap, as well as offering a refutation of the rival Machian, Kantian, Neo-Kantian, and other more eclectic interpretations of the influences on the work of the young Carnap. The book concludes with an assessment of Quine's critique of Carnap's 'analytic-synthetic' distinction and a criticism of the direction that analytic philosophy has taken in following in the footsteps of Quine's views.

Chapter 1

Carnap’s First Husserlian Book: Der Raum

A few decades after the demise of most of the official theses of logical empiricism an interest in the origins of that important philosophical school has arisen among analytic philosophers. Special attention has been given to the writings of the young Moritz Schlick, and even more to those of the young Hans Reichenbach and the young Rudolf Carnap. Particularly, Carnap’s especially important book, Der logische Aufbau der Welt,1 published in 1928, has been the object of intensive discussion and a variety of interpretations among Carnapian scholars. However, very few of those scholars have seen the necessity of examining Carnap’s dissertation, Der Raum,2 in order to better understand the young Carnap’s views and the evolution of his thought. The present author belongs to that small group of scholars who believe that to better understand Carnap’s views in Der logische Aufbau der Welt, one has to begin with an assessment of Der Raum, a work published in 1922, that is, three years before the completion of the first version of his 1928 book. Thus, this chapter is concerned with Carnap’s dissertation. We will see in an unadulterated state the great influence that Edmund Husserl exerted on the young Carnap.

1 Introduction

According to Carnap’s Intellectual Autobiography in the Schilpp volume,3 Carnap – who was born in Northern Germany in 1891 – moved with his family to Jena in 1909. From 1910 to 1914 he studied physics, mathematics and philosophy mostly in Jena, though it seems that he did spend – as is very common in Germany – some semesters in another university, in this case in Freiburg in Brisgau. Carnap does not specify when he was a student in the latter university, though Gottfried Gabriel in his introductory paper to Carnap Brought Home4 asserts that it was from 1911 to 1912 and that he attended, among others, courses of the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. In Jena, Carnap’s best-known professors were Bruno Bauch, the neo-Kantian, who was professor of philosophy at that university since 1911, and Gottlob Frege. Carnap attended three of Frege’s lecture courses. He did not take part, however, in any seminar given by Frege. This is very important, and has not been sufficiently stressed by Carnapian scholars. In German universities, traditionally a student did not have any contact with a professor offering a usual lecture course. The role of the students was essentially passive, and almost no one dared to interrupt a professor to ask questions. It was only in the seminars where the students got somewhat more acquainted with the professor, and the professor took notice of the existence of the students usually only when the student played an active role in the seminar. Moreover, only students who took part in seminars of a professor were considered to be his students, not those who merely heard lecture courses, but did not have any contact with the professor. Hence, it is not completely correct to assert – as some Carnapian scholars have done – that Carnap was a student of Frege in a strict sense.

The relation that intrigues the present author, however – and has intrigued him for four decades – is that of Carnap with Husserl. Officially, there was no contact between Carnap and Husserl. At least, Carnap seems never to have acknowledged such a contact and, superficially, it seems to be so. During the years 1910 to 1914, Husserl was professor in Göttingen. Although in 1911 the University of Jena had Husserl first in the list of possible candidates to occupy a vacant full professorship at that university, for some still unknown reasons, he did not receive the appointment, and instead it was precisely Bruno Bauch – Carnap’s future ‘Doktorvater’ – who was appointed. Moreover, Husserl received an appointment – as successor of Rickert – at the University of Freiburg in 1916, that is, during wartime, when Carnap was in military service. After the war, however, Carnap lived from 1919 to 1926 – with a few interruptions – in a town named Buchenbach, almost on the outskirts of Freiburg.5 During those years Husserl was generally regarded as the most important living German philosopher, and, moreover, one with an intellectual background very similar to that of Carnap, having studied mathematics, physics, philosophy and some astronomy.6 Nonetheless, Carnap seems never to have acknowledged that he had not resisted the temptation of meeting Husserl and taking part in his seminars or hearing his lectures. This selective amnesia is itself a mystery. In fact, there is some evidence that Carnap visited Husserl’s seminars three semesters in a row during the years 1924 to 1925,7 that is, exactly at the time when the former was finishing the first version of Der logische Aufbau der Welt. In a letter to Husserl, Ludwig Landgrebe – Husserl’s former student and assistant during those years – mentions the fact that he got acquainted with Carnap in one of Husserl’s seminars during those years.8 But, as we will see, it is in Der Raum, finished in 1921 and published in 1922, where Husserl’s presence seems most explicit or, to put it in more exact terms, less censored. It remains an open question for historians of logical empiricism either to establish or to refute the hypothesis that Carnap visited Husserl’s courses or met Husserl personally during the years 1919 to 1921.9 In any case, the probability of Carnap not visiting Husserl during that period would be similar to that of someone writing his dissertation in the outskirts of Boston in the 1960s, referring very often to Quine in that work, but never having visited Quine’s lectures or seminars, or having met him, during that period.

I have had the suspicion of a very strong Husserlian influence on the young Carnap for some forty years. I read the English expanded version of Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache10 in the second half of 1967, while I was working on my MA thesis on Husserl’s theory of a purely logical grammar, and was impressed by the similarity between Carnap’s distinction between formation rules and transformation rules and Husserl’s distinction in the first volume of Logische Untersuchungen11 and in Formale und transzendentale Logik12 between laws that protect against nonsense – the logico-grammatical first layer of logic – and laws that protect against countersense and examine the validity of arguments – that is, the logical or deductive layer. Moreover, I was disturbed by the fact that Carnap does not acknowledge that such a nowadays so familiar distinction is essentially Husserl’s – not Carnap’s, nor Frege’s, Russell’s nor Hilbert’s – and presented to the philosophical public thirty-four years before Carnap’s book. When some three years later I read Der Logische Aufbau der Welt – this time in German – I became convinced that the relation of that book with Husserl’s writings was much greater than that of Logische Syntax der Sprache. A few years ago I read Der Raum, and found Husserl’s influence on Carnap even more evident than in the other two writings. The sufficiently detailed exposition in the present chapter of Carnap’s views in that early neglected work will convince the reader of Husserl’s significant influence on the young Carnap and will make very plausible the suspicion that Carnap had already visited Husserl’s seminars or lectures before he completed his dissertation, that is, during the years 1919 to 1921, when Landgrebe (born in 1901) almost surely was still not a student in Husserl’s seminars and certainly was not Husserl’s assistant.

2 Introduction to the Study of Der Raum

The nineteenth century, especially its second half, and the first two decades of the twentieth century were years of profound revolutionary transformations in the three most fundamental sciences, namely, physics, mathematics and logic. In mathematics, the development of non-Euclidean geometries by Bolyai and Lobatschevsky – already anticipated by Gauß – in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the generalization and transformation of geometrical studies in the second half of that century in the hands of Riemann, Lie and Klein, among others, the emergence of algebraic structures as objects of mathematical research, as well as the rigourization of analysis at the hands of Bolzano and Cauchy in the first half of that century, and its arithmetization at the hands of Weierstraß, Dedekind and Cantor in its second half, transformed our conception of mathematics, a transformation that was consolidated by the emergence of more abstract structures during the twentieth century, including general topology in its first two decades. In logic, the pioneer work of Boole, De Morgan and others in the first half of the nineteenth century was followed by the important contributions of Charles S. Peirce, Ernst Schröder and others in the second half of that century, culminating in the revolutionary contributions to logic of Frege, Peano, Russell and Whitehead. In physics, the development of electromagnetism in the middle of the nineteenth century represented the first great challenge to Newtonian mechanics, whereas the emergence of the special and general theories of relativity, and of quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century replaced our old Newtonian world with totally new conceptions.

In philosophy, the Kantian foundation of science, which seemed to play the role of a philosophical foundation of Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry, suffered a consequent earthquake, and had either to be abandoned or to be radically repaired, as some neo-Kantians attempted to do. In the same vein as other important philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century well schooled in mathematics and physics – like Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach – Carnap begins his philosophical endeavours with a study of philosophical problems linked to the revolutionary development in our conception of space that occurred in the nineteenth century. However, in contrast to Russell, whose An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry13 of 1897 precedes the revolution in physics, as well as the development of general topology as an important area of mathematical research, and even some of the new developments in logic to which he would so decisively contribute some years later, Carnap – as well as his friend Reichenbach – had assimilated the development in the three fundamental sciences and was especially prepared and eager to put them to work in philosophical research.14 Thus, while in his above-mentioned book Russell contrasts the metric properties of space with the more general projective ones, he almost completely ignores the greater generality of topological spaces, and is not able to adequately assess the epoch-making contributions of Riemann to our understanding of spatial structures.15 Carnap was perfectly conscious of the relevance of the topological properties of space for its adequate understanding, and since he wrote a few years after the emergence of the general theory of relativity, he was in a better position than Russell to appreciate Riemann’s views on spatial structures and, in general, on manifolds.

As Carnap points out already in the Introduction to his valuable dissertation,16 his purpose in that small book is to offer an overview of...