Carnap, Feigl, and Hempel

Abstract In the 1940s and 1950s, Herbert Feigl and Carl Hempel became the most influential and institutionally successful logical empiricist philosophers in the USA. Although both were trained in the German-speaking world under Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach respectively, when Feigl and Hempel came to the USA in the 1930s, both took Carnap's philosophical style and outlook as the supreme model for the revolution in philosophy that logical empiricism was known for. Inspired by Carnap, they used logical formalization as their core method and the explication of the meta-theory of science as their goal. From the 1950s onward, both Hempel and Feigl also assimilated the radicalism of Carnap's rejection of traditional philosophy with existing interests in American philosophy, espeically concerning realism and ordinary language philosophy. In this way, they prepared the reception of Carnap's philosophy as part of the broader canon in analytic philosophy and as the overarrching background to the growing field of philosophy of science.