Hans Reichenbach

Hans Reichenbach (September 26, 1891, Hamburg, – April 9, 1953, Los Angeles) was a leading philosopher of science, educator and proponent of logical positivism. Reichenbach made important contributions to the philosophy of space and time, the geometry of space, the philosophical meaning of the theory of relativity, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, meaning and verifiability, and science and philosophy.

Life and work

Reichenbach is perhaps best known for founding the Berlin circle, a companion circle to the Vienna Circle and devoted to approximately the same interests, and for his logical positivism (or neopositivism, or logical empiricism).

After completing the secondary school in Hamburg, he studied civil engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, and physics, mathematics and philosophy at various universities, including Berlin, Erlangen, Göttingen and Munich. Among his teachers were Ernst Cassirer, David Hilbert, Max Planck, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld. Reichenbach was active in youth movements and student organizations, and published articles about the university reform, the freedom of research, and against anti-Semitic infiltrations in student organizations.

Reichenbach received a degree in philosophy from the University of Erlangen in 1915 and his dissertation on the theory of probability, supervised by Paul Hensel and Emmy 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 in 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 at Stuttgart as Privatdozent. In the same year, he published his first book on the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, 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.

In 1926, with the help of Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, Reichenbach became assistant professor in the pysics department of Berlin University.

He gained notice for his methods of teaching. Specifically, he was easily approached by students 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, he founded the 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. In 1930 he and Rudolf Carnap began editing the journal Erkenntnis ("Knowledge").

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Reichenbach emigrated to Turkey, where he headed the Department of Philosophy at the University of Istanbul. He introduced interdisciplinary seminars and courses on scientific subjects, and in 1935 he published The Theory of Probability.

In 1938, with the help of Charles Morris, he moved to the United States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics was published in 1944, followed by Elements of Symbolic Logic and The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. Hilary Putnam may have been his most prominent student. He helped establish UCLA as a leading philosophy department in the US in the post-war period.

He died on April 9, 1953 in Los Angeles while working on problems in the philosophy of time and on the nature of scientific laws. This work resulted in two books published posthumously: The Direction of Time and Nomological Statements and Admissible Operations.

Academic Genealogy
Notable teachers	Notable students
Max Born Ernst Cassirer David Hilbert Max Planck Arnold Sommerfeld Albert Einstein	Carl Hempel Hilary Putnam Wesley Salmon

Selected publications

1916. Der Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit fur die mathematische Darstellung der Wirklichkeit. Ph.D. dissertation, Erlangen.
1920. Relativitatstheorie und Erkenntnis apriori. English translation: 1965. The theory of relativity and a priori knowledge. University of California Press.
1922. "Der gegenwartige Stand der Relativitatsdiskussion." English translation: "The present state of the discussion on relativity" in Reichenbach (1959).
1924. Axiomatik der relativistischen Raum-Zeit-Lehre. English translation: 1969. Axiomatization of the theory of relativity. University of California Press.
1924. "Die Bewegungslehre bei Newton, Leibniz und Huyghens." English translation: "The theory of motion according to Newton, Leibniz, and Huyghens" in Reichenbach (1959).
1927. Von Kopernikus bis Einstein. Der Wandel unseres Weltbildes. English translation: 1942, From Copernicus to Einstein. Alliance Book Co.
1928. Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre. English translation: 1958, The philosophy of space and time. Dover.
1930. Atom und kosmos. Das physikalische Weltbild der Gegenwart. English translation: 1932, Atom and cosmos: the world of modern physics. G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.
1931. "Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie." English translation: "Aims and methods of modern philosophy of nature" in Reichenbach (1959).
1935. Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre : eine Untersuchung uber die logischen und mathematischen Grundlagen der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung. English translation: 1948, The theory of probability, an inquiry into the logical and mathematical foundations of the calculus of probability. University of California Press.
1938. Experience and prediction: an analysis of the foundations and the structure of knowledge. University of Chicago Press.
1944. Philosophic foundations of quantum mechanics. University of California Press.
1947. Elements of symbolic logic. Macmillan Co.
1948. "Philosophy and physics" in Faculty research lectures, 1946. Univ. of California Press.
1949. "The philosophical significance of the theory of relativity" in Schilpp, P. A., ed., Albert Einstein: philosopher-scientist. Evanston : The Library of Living Philosophers.
1951. The rise of scientific philosophy. University of California Press.
1954. Nomological statements and admissible operations. North Holland.
1956. The direction of time. University of California Press.
1959. Modern philosophy of science: Selected essays by Hans Reichenbach. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
1978. Selected writings, 1909-1953: with a selection of biographical and autobiographical sketches (Vienna circle collection). Dordrecht: Reidel.
1979. Hans Reichenbach, logical empiricist (Synthese library). Dordrecht : Reidel.
1991. Erkenntnis orientated: a centennial volume for Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach. Kluwer.
1991. Logic, language, and the structure of scientific theories : proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach centennial, University of Konstanz, 21-24 May 1991. University of Pittsburgh Press.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Achinstein, Peter, "Reichenbach, Hans," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, ed. Vol. 7, 115-118. New York & London: Macmillan, Inc., 1967.
Grünbaum, Adolf, 1963, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time. Chpt. 3. Dordrecht & Boston: Reidel, 1973.
Hempel, Carl, 1991, Hans Reichenbach Remembered, Erkenntnis 35: 5-10.
Nagel, Ernest, review of Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, in Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 42 (1945) 437-444.
Putnam, Hilary, review of The Direction of Time, in Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 59 (1962), 213-216.
Quine, W.V., review of Elements of Symbolic Logic, in Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 45 (1948), 161-166.
Salmon, Wesley, 1977, "The philosophy of Hans Reichenbach," Synthese 34: 5-88.
Salmon, Wesley, 1991, "Hans Reichenbach's Vindication of Induction," Erkenntnis 35: 99-122.

External links

Biography at The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Hans Reichenbach by Mauro Murzi.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle" by Frank Artzenius.

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