The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (IEUS) was a series of publications devoted to unified science. The IEUS was conceived at the Mundaneum Institute in The Hague in the 1930s, [1] and published in the United States beginning in 1938. It was an ambitious project that was never completed.
The IEUS was an output of the Vienna Circle to address the "growing concern throughout the world for the logic, the history, and the sociology of science..." [2] Only the first section Foundations of the Unity of Science (FUS) was published; it contains two volumes for a total of nineteen monographs published from 1938 to 1969.
Creation of the IEUS was facilitated by the International Congresses for the Unity of Science organized by members of the Vienna Circle. After a preliminary conference in Prague in 1934, the First International Congress for the Unity of Science was held at the Sorbonne, Paris, 16–21 September 1935. [3] : 171 It was attended by about 170 people from over twenty different countries. With the active involvement of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (Poland), Susan Stebbing (England), and Federigo Enriques (Italy) the scope of the project for an IEUS was considerably expanded. [3] : 173 The congress expressed its approval of the planned IEUS as proposed by the Mundaneum, and further set up a committee to plan future congresses. [3] : 173 This committee included the following members: [3] : 173
The Third International Congress for the Unity of Science, which was devoted exclusively to the IEUS, was held in Paris, 29–31 July 1937. [3] : 182
Encyclopedia and Unified Science (FUS I-1)
Otto Neurath, Niels Bohr, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris
Foundations of the Theory of Signs (FUS I-2)
Charles Morris
Foundations of Logic and Mathematics (FUS I-3)
Rudolf Carnap
Linguistic Aspects of Science (FUS I-4)
Leonard Bloomfield
Procedures of Empirical Science (FUS I-5)
Victor F. Lenzen
Principles of the Theory of Probability (FUS I-6)
Ernest Nagel
Foundations of Physics (FUS I-7)
Philipp Frank
Cosmology (FUS I-8)
E. Finlay-Freundlich
Foundations of Biology (FUS I-9)
Felix Mainx
The Conceptual Framework of Psychology (FUS I-10)
Egon Brunswik
Foundations of the Social Sciences (FUS II-1)
Otto Neurath
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (FUS II-2)
Thomas S. Kuhn
Science and the Structure of Ethics (FUS II-3)
Abraham Edel
Theory of Valuation (FUS II-4)
John Dewey
The Technique of Theory Construction (FUS II-5)
Joseph H. Woodger
Methodology of Mathematical Economics and Econometrics (FUS II-6)
Gerhard Tintner
Concept Formation in Empirical Science (FUS II-7)
Carl G. Hempel
The Development of Rationalism and Empiricism (FUS II-8)
George De Santillana, Edgar Zilsel
The Development of Logical Empiricism (FUS II-9)
Joergen Joergensen
Bibliography and Index (FUS II-10)
Herbert Feigl, Charles Morris
Historian David Hollinger argued that the IEUS was a less comprehensive account of the sciences of the time than it could have been, and was especially weak in the social sciences. [4] Hollinger noted that the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , published around the same time, provided a much more comprehensive account of the social sciences: "The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (12 vols., New York, 1933–1937) was a prodigious endeavor brought to successful completion by Alvin Johnson. This encyclopedia is a much more important episode in the history of thought than The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science yet has attracted much less attention from historians than the abortive enterprise led by Neurath." [4] Hollinger also said that the scholarly journal Philosophy of Science , founded in 1934, provided a much more inclusive perspective on the sciences in those years than did the IEUS. [4]
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle. This theory of knowledge asserted that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He is considered "one of the giants among twentieth-century philosophers."
Charles William Morris was an American philosopher and semiotician.
Mario Augusto Bunge was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles.
The Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick. The Vienna Circle's influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially philosophy of science and analytic philosophy, is immense up to the present day.
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was an Israeli philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. He was a pioneer in the fields of machine translation and formal linguistics.
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. He is especially well known for his articulation of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the raven paradox.
Hans Reichenbach was a leading philosopher of science, educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. He was influential in the areas of science, education, and of logical empiricism. He founded the Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie in Berlin in 1928, also known as the “Berlin Circle”. Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises, David Hilbert and Kurt Grelling all became members of the Berlin Circle.
Herbert Feigl was an Austrian-American philosopher and an early member of the Vienna Circle. He coined the term "nomological danglers".
The Kahlenberg is a mountain located in the 19th District of Vienna, Austria (Döbling).
The unity of science is a thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole.
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic (tautologies).
Rose Rand was an Austrian-American logician and philosopher. She was a member of the Vienna Circle.
Marie Neurath, born Marie Reidemeister, was a German designer, social scientist and author. Neurath was a member of the team that developed a simplified pictographic language, the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, which she later renamed Isotype. She was also a prolific writer and designer of educational books for younger readers.
Erkenntnis is a journal of philosophy that publishes papers in analytic philosophy. Its name is derived from the German word "Erkenntnis", meaning "knowledge, recognition". The journal was also linked to organisation of conferences, such as the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, of which it published the papers and accounts of the discussions.
The following is a bibliography of Charles W. Morris.
Neurath's boat is a simile used in anti-foundational accounts of knowledge, especially in the philosophy of science. It was first formulated by Otto Neurath. It is based in part on the Ship of Theseus which, however, is standardly used to illustrate other philosophical questions, to do with problems of identity. It was popularised by Willard Van Orman Quine in Word and Object (1960).
Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum was a Polish logician and philosopher. She published some twenty research papers along with translations into Polish of three books by Bertrand Russell. The main focus of her writings was on foundational problems related to probability, induction and confirmation. She is noted especially for authoring the first printed discussion of the Raven Paradox which she credits to Carl Hempel and the probabilistic solution she outlined to it. Shot by the Gestapo in 1942, she, like her husband Adolf Lindenbaum, and many other eminent representatives of Polish logic, shared the fate of millions of Jews murdered on Polish soil by the Nazis.
The Rudolf Carnap Papers are a large collection of documents and photographs that record much of his life and career. They are used by scholars and historians not only for research into the life of Rudolf Carnap but also for research into his theories and the theories of other scholars with whom he corresponded. The Carnap papers are restored, maintained, cataloged and housed in the Archives Service Center, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. They include extensive correspondence with others, lecture outlines for courses that he taught, and drafts of his published works and unpublished manuscripts. Much of the content of the Rudolf Carnap papers is available electronically and searchable through the finding aid through the archives. His work on metaphysics being essentially a question of semantics is still cited and have been further expanded by other scholars. His papers document his being considered a major contributor on the question of metaphysics. He was also a member of the Vienna Circle.