The Completion of Logical Empiricism: Hempel's Pragmatic Turn - a podcast by MCMP Team

Gereon Wolters (Konstanz) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (22 October, 2014) titled "The Completion of Logical Empiricism: Hempel's Pragmatic Turn". Abstract: For most of his life Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-1997) subscribed to the Carnapian variant of logical empiricism. According to Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) philosophy of science is "rational reconstruction" (syntactically and/or semantically) of basic methodological concepts like probability, explanation, confirmation, and so on. Practically unnoticed by the philosophical community Hempel later gave up this approach and developed an "explanatory-normative methodology" (E-N--Methodology). Decisive for his change was the work of Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996), whom Hempel first had met at Stanford in 1963/64. Hempel interpreted this pragmatic turn as a return to the Neurathian (Otto Neurath (1882-1945)) variant of logical empiricism.

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