Rudolf Carnap was born on 18 May 1891 in Ronsdorf (near Barmen, which is now a part of Wuppertal). From 1910 to 1914, he studied philosophy, mathematics and physics in Jena and Freiburg under Gottlob Frege, Bruno Bauch and Max Wien, amongst others. He earned his doctorate from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 1921. Starting in 1925, Carnap was in contact with Moritz Schlick. He received his habilitation (post-doctoral qualification) in 1926 from the University of Vienna and worked as a “Privatdozent” (lecturer) there from 1926-1931. Between 1931 and 1935, he was a professor (a.o. Prof.) of natural philosophy at the Deutsche Universität in Prague. In 1936, he emigrated to the United States with the help of Charles Morris and Willard V. O. Quine. He held the professorship at the University of Chicago that he was offered after his emigration until 1952. After spending two years at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1952 to 1954, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of California in Los Angeles, which he held from 1954 until his retirement in 1961. Carnap died on 14 September 1971 in Santa Monica, California.
He is considered to be a main advocate of logical empiricism. To ground the sciences in philosophy, he applied the modern logic advanced by Whitehead and Russell to the empirical sciences. Carnap’s contributions to probability theory and inductive logic also proved influential.
Microfilm copy, 40 rolls. There is a rough, unpublished catalogue and index of persons.