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Carnap, Reichenbach and the Great Intellectual Migration.Part II

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Carnap, Reichenbach and the Great Intellectual Migration.Part II Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy Coming to America: Carnap, Reichenbach and the Volume 8, Number 11 Great Intellectual Migration. Editor in Chief Part II: Hans Reichenbach Audrey Yap, University of Victoria Sander Verhaegh Editorial Board Annalisa Coliva, UC Irvine In the late 1930s, a few years before the start of the Second Henry Jackman, York University World War, a small number of European philosophers of sci- Frederique Janssen-Lauret, University of Manchester ence emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly Kevin C. Klement, University of Massachusetts perilous situation on the continent. Among the first expatriates Consuelo Preti, The College of New Jersey were Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, arguably the most Marcus Rossberg, University of Connecticut influential logical empiricists of their time. In this two-part pa- Anthony Skelton, Western University per, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly nu- Mark Textor, King’s College London merous interactions with American academics in the decades Richard Zach, University of Calgary before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. This second part traces Reichenbach’s devel- Editors for Special Issues opment and focuses on his frequent interactions with American Sandra Lapointe, McMaster University academics throughout the 1930s. I show that Reichenbach was Alexander Klein, McMaster University quite ignorant about developments in Anglophone philosophy Review Editors in the first stages of his career but became increasingly focused Sean Morris, Metropolitan State University of Denver on the United States from the late 1920s onwards. I reconstruct Sanford Shieh, Wesleyan University Reichenbach’s efforts to find a job across the Atlantic and show that some of his English publications—most notably Experience Design and Layout and Prediction—were attempts to change the American narrative Daniel Harris, Hunter College about logical empiricism. Whereas U. S. philosophers identified Kevin C. Klement, University of Massachusetts scientific philosophy with the views of the Vienna Circle, Re- ichenbach aimed to market his probabilistic philosophy of sci- ISSN: 2159-0303 ence as a subtler alternative. jhaponline.org © 2020 Sander Verhaegh Coming to America: Carnap, Reichenbach This part is structured as follows: after an overview of Re- and the Great Intellectual Migration. ichenbach’s ignorance about Anglophone philosophy in the first Part II: Hans Reichenbach stages of his academic career (2), I reconstruct his “American turn” in the early 1930s, focusing especially on the reception of his philosophy by a group of New York philosophers (3). Sander Verhaegh Next, I describe the increasing tensions between Reichenbach and the Vienna Circle (4) and—after an intermezzo reconstruct- ing Reichenbach’s first attempts to find a position in the United Ich habe das Gefühl, dass gerade Amerika mit seinem Sinn für das States (5–6)—I outline his efforts to correct the American narra- konkrete und technische mehr Verständnis haben müsste für meine tive about the role the Vienna Circle played in the development naturwissenschaftliche Philosophie als Europa, wo noch immer die of scientific philosophy (7, 9). In the final sections, I reconstruct mystisch-metaphysischen Spekulationen als die wahre Philosophie angesehen werden. how Reichenbach finally found a job with the help of Charles Morris, who, I show, played a crucial role in the development of Reichenbach to Sidney Hook, 31 January 1935 scientific philosophy in the United States (8, 10) and I conclude this two-part paper with a discussion of the ways in which the 1. Introduction story of Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s turn to America sheds new light on the development of logical empiricism. In the late 1930s, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, ar- guably the two most prominent logical empiricists of their time, emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly per- 2. Early insularity ilous situation on the continent. Once in the U. S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical landscape. In the first phase of his academic career, Reichenbach appears In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichen- to have been largely ignorant about Anglophone developments bach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American schol- in the philosophy of science. In debates about the philosophical ars throughout the 1920s and 1930s in order to better explain the implications of relativity theory, the focal point of his writings transformation of analytic philosophy in the years before and af- throughout the 1920s, Reichenbach almost exclusively concen- ter the Second World War. In the first part of this paper (Verhaegh trated on German interlocutors such as Moritz Schlick, Ernst 2020), I reconstructed Carnap’s contacts with American philoso- Cassirer, and Hermann Weyl, who had all published influen- phers throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In this second part, I focus tial analyses of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the late 1910s 2 on Reichenbach’s interactions with the American philosophical and early 1920s. Although there was a significant literature community before he moved to the United States. I argue that Archives of Scientific Philosophy, the Charles Morris’ Records of the Unity of some of Reichenbach’s work from the mid-1930s, in particular Science Movement (USM), the papers of Moritz Schlick at the Wiener Kreis Experience and Prediction (1938a), can be better understood if we Archiv in Haarlem (MSP), and the University of Chicago Archives (UCA). take into account the context in which it was written.1 Transcriptions and translations are mine unless indicated otherwise. 2 1 See, e.g., Schlick (1917), Cassirer (1921), Weyl (1923), and, for a reconstruc- The present paper is based on material from the Hans Reichenbach Papers tion, Ryckman (2005). (hereafter, HRP) and the Rudolf Carnap Papers (hereafter, RCP) at Pittsburgh’s Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy vol. 8 no. 11 [24] on relativity theory in the United States (e.g., Carmichael 1912; work of Charles Sanders Peirce, who had already been develop- Tolman 1917) and in Great Britain (e.g., Robb 1914; Eddington ing a frequency theory of probability in the late 19th century. In 1918), he cited no contemporary Anglophone philosophers or fact, it was not until the mid-1930s, when he had just published scientists in Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis apriori (1920), the his Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre (1935b), that Reichenbach discovered book in which Reichenbach first explicated his “method of logi- that his theory was “just in the line of [Peirce’s] thought” (Re- cal analysis”, arguing that it is the task of philosophy to classify ichenbach to Hook, 19 October 1935, HRP, 013-46-72).5 and order the fundamental assumptions of scientific theories. Reichenbach’s parochialism was not unique. At the time, many Reichenbach’s ignorance about the Anglophone world is even German philosophers almost exclusively focused on internal, more evident in his second book, Axiomatik der relativistischen Germanophone debates—a situation that often annoyed their Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1924), which applies this method by develop- American contemporaries. The New York philosopher Sidney ing an axiomatization of relativity theory. The book completely Hook, for example, aptly described the problem in a report about ignores the work of Alfred Arthur Robb, a Cambridge mathe- his year in Europe: matician who had constructed a similar axiomatization about What impresses the foreign student . is . [t]he insularity of ten years before (Robb 1914). Whereas Reichenbach devised an German philosophy . epitomized in the naïve declaration of one axiom system which assumed “the relation of cause and effect” Privat-dozent that the history of philosophy . since Kant is the as a primitive term (1956, 25), Robb had developed a relativistic history of German philosophy . Whitehead, Dewey and San- geometry on a purely causal basis, a view that has been dubbed tayana, are hardly names . William James seems to be the only the “causal theory of space-time” (Winnie 1977). Unlike Weyl, American philosopher who is known—and he is more often ‘re- who cited Robb’s work in his influential Spanish lectures (1923, futed’ than read. I have heard many refutations of pragmatism in 8), Reichenbach seems to have been unaware that a comparable Germany. Most of them were variations on the theme that man is 3 born to something higher than merely to fill his stomach. (Hook system had already been developed. 1930, 146) Also in his early work on probability, the fundamental theme of his philosophy throughout his career, Reichenbach was surpris- Nor was this shortsightedness restricted to the Schulphilosophen, ingly ignorant about Anglophone developments. Although John often accused of navel-gazing by scientific philosophers. When Maynard Keynes had made significant contributions to probabil- Ernest Nagel first visited a meeting of the Unity of Science move- ity theory in the early 1920s, Reichenbach appears to have been ment in the mid 1930s, for example, he was surprised to learn unaware of Keynes’ work until the latter’s Treatise on Probabil- that the attendants had no knowledge of Peirce’s philosophy. ity was translated into German.4 Nor did Reichenbach cite the In a report about the conference, Nagel wondered whether this testified “the provincialism of their reading habits” or the “inac- 3 See also Glymour and Eberhardt (2016): “Reichenbach’s apparent unfamil- cessibility
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