Hans Reichenbach

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Hans Reichenbach
UCLA
Theses
Wesley Salmon
Main interests
Philosophy of science
Notable ideas
List
  • empirical laws) vs. axioms of coordination (constitutive principles)[2]

Hans Reichenbach (September 26, 1891 – April 9, 1953) was a leading

educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. He was influential in the areas of science, education, and of logical empiricism. He founded the Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie (Society for Empirical Philosophy) in Berlin in 1928, also known as the "Berlin Circle". Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises, David Hilbert and Kurt Grelling
all became members of the Berlin Circle.

In 1930, Reichenbach and

reasoning; and quantum mechanics.[4] In 1951, he authored The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, his most popular book.[5][6]

Early life

Hans was the second son of a Jewish merchant, Bruno Reichenbach, who had converted to Protestantism. He married Selma Menzel, a school mistress, who came from a long line of Protestant professionals which went back to the Reformation.[7] His elder brother Bernard played a significant role in the left communist movement. His younger brother, Herman was a music educator.

After completing secondary school in

Munich. Among his teachers were Ernst Cassirer, David Hilbert, Max Planck, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld
.

Political activism

Reichenbach was active in

Karl Wittfogel, Alexander Schwab and his other brother Herman at this time.[10] In 1919 his text Student und Sozialismus: mit einem Anhang: Programm der Sozialistischen Studentenpartei was published by Hermann Schüller, an activist with the League for Proletarian Culture. However following his attending lectures by Albert Einstein in 1919, he stopped participating in political groups.[11]

Academic career

Reichenbach received a degree in

theory of probability, titled Der Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit für die mathematische Darstellung der Wirklichkeit (The Concept of Probability for the Mathematical Representation of Reality) and supervised by Paul Hensel and Max Noether, was published in 1916. Reichenbach served during World War I on the Russian front, in the German army radio troops. In 1917 he was removed from active duty, due to an illness, and returned to Berlin. While working as a physicist and engineer, Reichenbach attended Albert Einstein's lectures on the theory of relativity in Berlin
from 1917 to 1920.

In 1920 Reichenbach began teaching at the

Technische Hochschule Stuttgart as Privatdozent. In the same year, he published his first book (which was accepted as his habilitation in physics at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart) on the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori), which criticized the Kantian notion of synthetic a priori
. He subsequently published Axiomatization of the Theory of Relativity (1924), From Copernicus to Einstein (1927) and The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928), the last stating the logical positivist view on the theory of relativity.

Reichenbach distinguishes between axioms of connection and of coordination. Axioms of connection are those scientific laws which specify specific relations between specific physical things, like

equations are based upon the axioms of coordination of arithmetic.[12]

Another distinction of his was between the 'context of discovery' and 'context of justification'. The way scientists come up with ideas is not always the same as the way they justify them, and so as separate objects of study Reichenbach distinguished between them.[13]

In 1926, with the help of Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, Reichenbach became assistant professor in the physics department of the University of Berlin. He gained notice for his methods of teaching, as he was easily approached and his courses were open to discussion and debate. This was highly unusual at the time, although the practice is nowadays a common one.

In 1928, Reichenbach founded the so-called "Berlin Circle" (German: Die Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie; English: Society for Empirical Philosophy). Among its members were Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises, David Hilbert and Kurt Grelling. The Vienna Circle manifesto lists 30 of Reichenbach's publications in a bibliography of closely related authors. In 1930 he and Rudolf Carnap began editing the journal Erkenntnis.

When

interdisciplinary
seminars and courses on scientific subjects, and in 1935 he published The Theory of Probability.

In 1938, with the help of

Wesley Salmon were perhaps his most prominent students. During his time there, he published several of his most notable books, including Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics in 1944, Elements of Symbolic Logic in 1947, and The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (his most popular book) in 1951.[5][6]

Reichenbach died unexpectedly of a heart attack on April 9, 1953. He was living in Los Angeles at the time, and had been working on problems in the philosophy of time and on the nature of scientific laws. As part of this he proposed a three part model of time in language, involving speech time, event time and — critically — reference time, which has been used by linguists since for describing tenses.[14] This work resulted in two books published posthumously: The Direction of Time and Nomological Statements and Admissible Operations.

Archives

Hans Reichenbach manuscripts, photographs, lectures, correspondence, drawings and other related materials are maintained by the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, Special Collections, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh.[4] Much of the content has been digitized. Some more notable content includes:

  • Correspondence to Nagel, 1934-1938[15]
  • Philosophy Congress[16]
  • Responses to Questionnaire[17]
  • Weyl's Extension of the Riemannian Concept of Space, Appendix[18]

Selected publications

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISSN 1095-5054
    .
  2. ^ Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (CSLI/University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 32.
  3. ^ a b Nikolay Milkov, "The Berlin Group and the Vienna Circle: Affinities and Divergences", in: N. Milkov & V. Peckhaus (eds.), The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism. Springer, pp. 3–32. esp. pp. 13–14 (2013).
  4. ^ a b "Guide to the Hans Reichenbach Papers, 1884-1972 ASP.1973.01". ULS Archives & Special Collections. University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved 2015-12-01.
  5. ^
    ISBN 978-94-009-9404-1
    .
  6. ^ a b MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
  7. ISBN 978-94-009-9404-1
    .
  8. ISBN 978-94-007-5485-0
    .
  9. ISBN 978-90-277-0292-0
    .
  10. ^ "Wittfogel, Karl August". www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de. Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur. Retrieved 9 July 2020.
  11. ^ Mcadam, Roger Michael. "Hans Reichenbach: philosopher-engineer" (PDF). Durham e-Theses. Durham University. Retrieved 16 April 2019.
  12. doi:10.1007/s11229-009-9590-0
    .
  13. ^ Encyclopedia of Science Education. Springer. 2015. pp. 229–232.
  14. ^ Derczynski, L; Gaizauskas, R (2013). "Empirical Validation of Reichenbach's Tense Framework". Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Semantics. Archived from the original on 2016-10-27. Retrieved 2013-03-14.
  15. ^ "Philipp Frank Correspondence" (PDF). Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved 2015-12-01.
  16. ^ "Philosophy Congress" (PDF). Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved 2015-12-01.
  17. ^ "Responses to Questionnaire" (PDF). Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved 2015-12-01.
  18. ^ "Weyl's Extension of the Riemannian Concept of Space and the Geometrical Interpretation of Electricity" (PDF). Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved 2015-12-01.

Sources

  • Adolf Grünbaum, 1963, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time. Alfred A. Knopf. Ch. 3.
  • Günther Sandner, The Berlin Group in the Making: Politics and Philosophy in the Early Works of Hans Reichenbach and Kurt Grelling. Proceedings of 10th International Congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science (HOPOS), Ghent, July 2014. (Abstract.)
  • Carl Hempel
    , 1991, Hans Reichenbach remembered, Erkenntnis 35: 5–10.
  • Wesley Salmon
    , 1977, "The philosophy of Hans Reichenbach," Synthese 34: 5–88.
  • Wesley Salmon (ed.), 1979, Hans Reichenbach: Logical Empiricist. Springer.
  • Wesley Salmon, 1991, "Hans Reichenbach's vindication of induction," Erkenntnis 35: 99–122.

External links

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