Intended as a companion to Origins of Logical Empiricism (Giere and Richardson Reference Giere and Richardson1996), Logical Empiricism in North America includes eleven essays (and an editors’ introduction) on the emigration of logical empiricism from Europe to North America, its role in shaping twentieth century philosophy of science, and its demise. The volume features contributions from some of the leading contemporary researchers on logical empiricism, and continues the first-rate standard of scholarship set by its groundbreaking predecessor in the Minnesota Studies series.

The first two essays examine the relationship between logical empiricism, American pragmatism, and philosophy of science. Alan Richardson offers an account (featuring Carnap, Charles Morris, and Quine) on the rise and fall of logical empiricism in North America. Richardson argues (against Ronald Giere) that logical empiricism's positive reception in the 1940s resulted from an affinity (not an opposition) between logical empiricism and pragmatism, viz., a shared vision of scientific philosophy. In locating the fall of logical empiricism in Quine, Richardson observes that Quine's naturalistic version of scientific philosophy shares none of the social goals that motivated the philosophies of Carnap, Neurath, Dewey, and Morris. Don Howard's essay, “Two Left Turns Make a Right,” examines a shift that philosophy of science took in the late 1950s. According to Howard, from 1930 to 1959, philosophers of science (including both logical empiricists and pragmatists) were pursuing socially and politically engaged projects; however, after 1959, philosophy of science became socially and politically disengaged. A highlight of Howard's essay is his analysis of the journal Philosophy of Science, which he uses to support his historical thesis. The two ‘lefts’ in Howard's story are the Marxist socialism of logical empiricism and the democratic liberalism of American pragmatism; the ‘right’ is the naturalism shared by Neurath and Dewey, which Howard suggests can address “pressing social and political problems of the day” (77).

The next four essays are studies on individual logical empiricists. Michael Friedman's contribution is a tribute to his former teacher at Princeton, Carl Hempel. Between personal anecdotes, Friedman examines the influence of the Vienna Circle (Neurath, Carnap, and Schlick) on the development of Hempel's views. Friedman traces Hempel's endorsement of a pragmatic and naturalistic perspective (away from a Carnapian perspective of ‘explication’) in the 1970s to Hempel's sympathy towards Neurath's position on the protocol sentence debates in the 1930s. Rudolf Haller examines Herbert Feigl's academic career in Vienna and the United States, arguing that Feigl's mature positions on analyticity and the mind-body problem reflect the influence of Feigl's teacher, Moritz Schlick. Diederick Raven documents the tragic case of Edgar Zilsel, a peripheral member of the Vienna Circle who committed suicide in 1944 shortly after moving to the United States. Raven argues that Zilsel's suicide should be understood in terms of his intellectual marginalization and estrangement from his wife. Thomas Uebel analyzes Philipp Frank's retrospective accounts of the history of the Vienna Circle written in the 1940s. In these accounts, Frank promotes the idea that the Vienna Circle had its proper roots in the ‘first Vienna Circle’ of 1907–1912 (Neurath, Hahn, and Frank), while downplaying the importance of the more famous Vienna Circle of 1925–1935 that was organized around Schlick (Waismann, Carnap, Neurath, Hahn, and Frank). Uebel suggests that Frank adopted this rhetorical stance to reaffirm the pragmatic-historical approach that united the earlier group, and divided the ‘left-wing’ of the later group.

The next two essays discuss cooperative endeavors that logical empiricists undertook in North America. Gary Hardcastle examines the Harvard “Science of Science” discussion group (organized by Carnap and S. S. Stevens) that met from 1940 to 1941, and included an impressive group of participants (e.g., Carnap, Russell, Tarski, and Quine). Hardcastle compares the interdisciplinary (“debabelizing science”) ideal of unity of science associated with this group to the Neurathian ideal of unity proffered by Frank in the mid-1940s. George Reisch explains the failure of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (1940–1970) in terms of the disunity among the editors: Neurath, Carnap, and Morris. Reisch offers a fascinating glimpse into the personal dynamics among these three editors, who failed to meet the ideal of intellectual cooperation that they promoted. In closing his essay, Reisch reveals that his ‘Neurathian’ explanation—i.e., explaining large-scale events with small-scale causes—for the failure of the Encyclopedia is also meant to serve as an explanation for the demise of logical empiricism.

Friedrich Stadler's essay (which might have been better placed as the first chapter) provides a comprehensive history of the emigration of the Vienna Circle from 1930 to 1939, and the role of logical empiricism in the emergence of North American philosophy of science from 1940 to 1960. Highlights of Stadler's essay include discussion of more marginal members of the Vienna Circle (viz., Bergmann and Kaufmann), and the founding of philosophy of science centers at the Universities of Minnesota (by Feigl in 1953) and Pittsburgh (by Grünbaum in 1960).

The last two essays discuss the Carnap-Quine debates on analyticity. Richard Creath provides a comprehensive treatment of Quine's main argument in “Carnap and Logical Truth” against Carnap's ‘linguistic doctrine of logical truth’. Creath takes issue with Quine's assumption that elementary logic is obvious (while set theory is not), suggesting that this assumption only gains its plausibility from its ambiguity. Creath concludes that Quine—in failing to engage with Carnap—does not present an argument against Carnap, but offers an entirely different program. Thomas Ricketts identifies a fundamental point of conflict between Carnap and Quine in their different understandings of logical notation and the application of logic to the language of science. Ricketts provides an excellent summary of Carnap's ‘logic of science’ (Wissenschaftslogik) program during the years 1932–1955, emphasizing that—for the purposes of reconstructing observation predicates in scientific theories—Carnap assumes a logical framework that includes mathematics and treats the language of science as a calculus (or ‘calculus/semantic system’). Quine rejects Carnap's way of addressing empirical testability, preferring the weaker notational framework of elementary quantificational logic for the purposes of clarifying and simplifying scientific statements.

Overall, this volume is wide-ranging, engaging, and informative. All of the essays are of high caliber; the essays by Uebel, Ricketts, Howard, Stadler, and Friedman are exceptional. In the editors’ introduction, Richardson and Hardcastle present the volume as a contribution to the history of philosophy of science. The volume is testament to the value and contemporary relevance of such studies, and a fine contribution to scholarship on logical empiricism.