Rudolf Carnap. Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891 – September 14, 1970) was a German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. Life and work[edit] Carnap's Birthplace in Wuppertal Carnap's father had risen from the status of a poor ribbon-weaver to become the owner of a ribbon-making factory. In 1928, Carnap published two important books: The Logical Structure of the World (German: "Der logische Aufbau der Welt"), in which he developed a rigorous formal version of empiricism, defining all scientific terms in phenomenalistic terms.
In February 1930 Tarski lectured in Vienna, and during November 1930 Carnap visited Warsaw. Carnap, whose socialist and pacifist beliefs put him at risk in Nazi Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1935 and became a naturalized citizen in 1941. Carnap taught himself Esperanto when he was 14 years of age, and remained sympathetic to it (Carnap 1963). Bertrand Russell. Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 20th century.[58] He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G.
E. Moore, and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians.[55] With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. Russell was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed anti-imperialism[60][61] and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I.[62] Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.[63] In 1950 Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought Biography Early life and background Early career.
Kurt Gödel. Kurt Friedrich Gödel (/ˈkɜrt ɡɜrdəl/; German: [ˈkʊʁt ˈɡøːdəl] ( ); April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was an Austrian, and later American, logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell,[1] A. N. Whitehead,[1] and David Hilbert were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics. Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms.
Life[edit] Paul Churchland. Paul Churchland (born October 21, 1942) is a Canadian philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind.[1] He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where he held the Valtz Chair of Philosophy[2] and a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and the Institute for Neural Computation.[3] He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars.[4] Churchland is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland.
He is also the father of two children, Mark and Anne Churchland, both of whom are neuroscientists.[5][6][7] Professional career[edit] Philosophical views[edit] Just as modern science has discarded such notions as legends or witchcraft, Churchland holds the belief that a future, fully matured neuroscience is likely to have no need for "beliefs" (see propositional attitudes). Works[edit] Books[edit] Essays[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] Eliminative materialism. Eliminativists argue that modern belief in the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to the ancient belief in obsolete theories such as the geocentric model of the universe. Eliminativism stands in opposition to reductive materialism, which argues that a mental state is well defined, and that further research will result in a more detailed, but not different understanding.[3] An intermediate position is revisionary materialism, which will often argue that the mental state in question will prove to be somewhat reducible to physical phenomena - with some changes to the common sense concept.
Eliminativism about a class of entities is the view that that class of entities does not exist.[4] For example, all forms of materialism are eliminativist about the soul; modern chemists are eliminativist about phlogiston; and modern physicists are eliminativist about the existence of luminiferous aether. Overview[edit] Philosophers who argue against eliminativism may take several approaches. Daniel Dennett. Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942)[1][2] is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.[3] Early life and education[edit] Dennett was born on March 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Marjorie (née Leck) and Daniel Clement Dennett, Jr.[6][7] Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut.[8] When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash.[9] Dennett says that he was first introduced to the notion of philosophy while attending summer camp at age 11, when a camp counselor said to him, "You know what you are, Daniel?
First ... Jerry Fodor.