Coming to America: Carnap, Reichenbach, and the Great Intellectual Migration. Part II: Hans Reichenbach

In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U.S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Building on archival material of several key players and institutions in the development of scientific philosophy, I take some first steps toward answering the question why logical empiricism became so successful in the United States after the War. Part I reconstructs Carnap’s development between 1923, when he first visited New York, and 1936, when he was offered a position at the University of Chicago. Part II traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. In both parts, special attention is paid to the zealous efforts of a number of American academics (most notably Edward Allen, Sidney Hook, C. I. Lewis, Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, and W. V. Quine) to market the work of Carnap and Reichenbach in the United States.