Make Entry -- Become an Editor -- Most Popular: (10, 25, 50, 75, 100)

   Help

Carl Hempel

Born in Germany in 1905, Carl Gustav Hempel was one of the leading proponents of logical positivism and an influential philosopher of science. He studied philosophy, mathematics and physics while a student at different universities in Germany, and it was while attending a conference organized by the logical positivists in 1929 regarding scientific philosophy that he met Rudolf Carnap. Carnap was a founder of the philosophical school known as logical positivism and made enough of an impact on the young Hempel that he moved to Vienna to become part of Carnap’s group (known as the Vienna Circle).

The relationship between the two men continued on for years and spanned two different continents. In 1937 Hempel left Europe for the United States in order to be an assistant to Carnap at the University of Chicago. Hempel lived the remainder of his life in America, teaching at a number of schools including Yale University and the University of Princeton.

A philosopher of science, Hempel is perhaps known most for the Hempel Paradox (which raises a problem for the principle of induction) and for the deductive-nomological model (a deductive model of scientific explanation where explanation is taken to be a logical deduction from scientific law – thus particular phenomena are explained only in virtue of their subsumption under a general law) which resulted from Hempel’s fruitful collaboration with Paul Oppenheim.

Web Resources On Carl Hempel

IEP: Carl Gustav Hempel
Wikipedia: Carl Gustav Hempel

Book Resources On Carl Hempel

The Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel: Studies in Science, Explanation, and Rationality by Carl Gustav Hempel, et al.
Philosophy of Natural Science by Carl Gustav Hempel

Site Maps: Most Recent | Clusters | Browse
New: Graduate Student Job Opportunity