Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap, born Paul Rudolf Carnap in Germany in 1891 and died in the United States, where he had emigrated in 1935, in 1970, was a philosopher and logician who became one of the leading members of the Vienna Circle, the group of philosophers and scientists that developed logical positivism in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. He argued that many traditional metaphysical questions were not false but literally meaningless, because they could not in principle be verified or falsified by experience, and he devoted much of his career to constructing precise formal languages in which the logical structure of scientific knowledge could be made fully explicit, work set out in books including The Logical Structure of the World. After emigrating to the United States to escape Nazi Germany, Carnap taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles, and his work on probability, confirmation theory and the philosophy of language remained influential in analytic philosophy long after logical positivism itself declined as a movement.