Building a New Thursday Circle Carnap and Frank in Prague Adam Tamas Tuboly Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences; University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary
[email protected] 1 Building a New Thursday Circle Carnap and Frank in Prague1 1. Introduction When Carnap wrote a short intellectual autobiography for Marcel Boll in March 1933, he mentioned two things about Prague: (1) that he became a professor at the German University in 1931, and (2) that he worked on his Logische Syntax der Sprache until 1933.2 These things are well known. Carnap spent, however, five long years in Prague, just like he did before in Vienna: so, one might ask, whether (1) and (2) indeed sufficiently characterize his Prague- period. Philipp Frank (1949, 45), who was there for almost twenty years when Carnap arrived, wrote that “[f]rom 1931 on we [i.e. Frank and Carnap] had in this way a new center of ‘scientific world conception’ at the University of Prague.” This seems to be much more than what Carnap claimed. Actually Carnap might have had great expectations regarding Prague: the First Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, where the Vienna Circle made public its manifesto, was organized by Frank there in 1929; five years later in 1934 the Preliminary Conference of the International Congresses for the Unity of Science was hosted again in Prague. As Jan Sebestik (1994, 205) claimed, “Prague has always been one of the important European centres of learning and of science, and it has often been the forerunner of vast currents or movements, both intellectual and political.” The city also had a long tradition of scientifically oriented philosophical thinking: through Bernard Bolzano, members of the Brentano-School (such as Anton Marty, Tomáš G.