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Hans Reichenbach died suddenly on April 9, 1953. He was recognized, in this country and abroad, as a leading philosopher of logical empiricism and as a world authority in the philosophy of science.
Born on September 26, 1891, in Hamburg, Germany, Hans Reichenbach came to spend his life in widely separated parts of the world--Central Europe, the Near East, and the Far West of the United States. His personal life and professional career were affected by the totalitarian political pressures of our age, but also became a symbol of the traditional idea that there is an international community of free scholars.
He received his academic training in Germany, studying primarily mathematics, physics, and philosophy and taking his Ph.D. at the University of Erlangen in 1915. He began his academic career in 1920 at the Technical Institute in Stuttgart as a Lecturer in Physics, and later in Philosophy. While he discovered early that his primary interests were theoretical, he always displayed, to the end of his life, great practical abilities. He had also studied engineering, and worked, from 1917 to 1920, as a physicist and engineer in the scientific laboratory of a radio firm in Berlin. Throughout his life he retained and used many of his practical skills as a hobby in his home and workshop. In 1926, he was appointed, with the recommendations of Einstein and Planck, to the position of Associate Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1933 he left Germany, as did many eminent scientists and scholars, for political reasons, and went to Istanbul as a Professor of Philosophy. In 1938 he was invited to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became the most distinguished professor in the Department of Philosophy and one of the most distinguished members of the faculty at the University.
His influence was, of course, particularly great in the Department of Philosophy, where his colleagues acknowledged gratefully the impetus provided by his outstanding work, and where he was most successful in stimulating and supervising the work of more than a dozen Ph.D. candidates during the last ten years. But his influence extended throughout the University. He maintained close connections with other departments, especially the Department of Physics, where he taught a graduate course in statistical mechanics during World War II. He also served on numerous doctoral and promotion committees, at one time was a member of the Graduate Council, later a member of the Research Lecture Committee, and was himself appointed Faculty Research Lecturer in 1946, the second philosopher upon whom this honor has been bestowed.
This formal listing, however, cannot convey the true measure of his impact upon the University and upon his students, which was expressed as much through daily personal contact with him as through the force of his ideas and his amazing productivity. He was a most successful lecturer on all levels of instruction, and communicated to all his students, whether undergraduate or advanced, his own personal conception of philosophy as a rigorous scientific pursuit demanding intellectual integrity, logical precision, and indefatigable research. He taught as much by the personal example he set as by the distinguished work he accomplished.
The major intellectual influences in his own life and thought came from outside philosophy, a fact which was responsible for some of his most outstanding contributions to philosophy. He was an expert in physics and mathematics, and his philosophical contributions centered around and consistently returned to the borderline between science and philosophy; in particular, to the two great theoretical developments in contemporary physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Philosophy was for him the logical and epistemological reconstruction of scientific knowledge; and to this task he devoted his entire work with remarkable consistency throughout his life.
The first book he published was on Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis a priori (1920); and to the problem of interpreting and clarifying the logical foundations of relativity, involving the basic concepts of space, time, and causality, he returned in several major works: Axiomatik der relativistischen Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1924); From Copernicus to Einstein (1927; American edition, 1942); Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1928; an English translation to be published posthumously); Atom and Cosmos (1930; translated into four languages); Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie (1931). At the time of his death he was completing another comprehensive work on the nature of time, with special emphasis on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and information theory.
His dissertation (1915) was concerned with an analysis of the concept of probability, written still under the influence of the philosophy of Kant. The theory of probability continued to engage him throughout his life, stimulated by his analysis of the meaning of scientific truth and prediction, the problem of induction, the status of causality and probability in quantum mechanics, and culminating in the monumental work, The Theory of Probability (1935; revised English edition, 1949), and in the application of his system of three-valued logic to the Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1944). This extensive and basic work in the logical analysis of science was prepared and incorporated in epistemological and logical studies such as Experience and Prediction (1938) and Elements of Symbolic Logic (1947).
It is impossible to do justice to the enormous productivity of Hans Reichenbach or to the full significance of his work. In the philosophy of science he had few who were his equal; and the body of his work represents original philosophical thinking of the highest quality, indispensable to any student in the field and leaving a lasting mark upon the progress of science and philosophy. His publications in scientific journals alone consist of over eighty titles, many of which, like his books, appeared in several languages. However, in addition to the technical works he wrote, he was also singularly gifted in translating complex and abstract ideas into simple, clear language intelligible to the nonspecialist. He frequently contributed to nonscientific papers and journals; the book Atom and Cosmos grew out of a series of talks given over the Berlin radio; a recent work, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), was a selection of the Book Find Club. This rare ability of being at once a skilled expert, an original thinker, and a responsible popularizer immensely increased his effectiveness as a teacher. By virtue of this combination he was himself the best example of his conviction that the primary task of philosophy was to make our ideas as clear as possible.
He made other noteworthy contributions to philosophy. In Berlin he founded a circle of scientific philosophy and became Coeditor--with R. Carnap, a member of the Vienna circle--of the journal Erkenntnis; Annalen der Philosophie, a highly influential voice in the development of scientific philosophy and logical empiricism, later transplanted to this country as the Journal of Unified Science. He also retained close contact with numerous scholars and scientists throughout this country and the world. Only last year (1952), he gave a series of lectures at the Institut Henri Poincaré, Sorbonne, Paris. This year, at the time of his death, he had been invited to give the William James Lectures at Harvard.
While the loss of Hans Reichenbach is truly immeasurable to the Department of Philosophy and to the University, the body of his work and distinguished achievements will continue to be alive in the scientific world, because they have already become a permanent part of contemporary philosophy.
A. Kaplan
H. Meyerhoff
P. Friedlander
E. Kinsey
Born on September 26, 1891, in Hamburg, Germany, Hans Reichenbach came to spend his life in widely separated parts of the world--Central Europe, the Near East, and the Far West of the United States. His personal life and professional career were affected by the totalitarian political pressures of our age, but also became a symbol of the traditional idea that there is an international community of free scholars.
He received his academic training in Germany, studying primarily mathematics, physics, and philosophy and taking his Ph.D. at the University of Erlangen in 1915. He began his academic career in 1920 at the Technical Institute in Stuttgart as a Lecturer in Physics, and later in Philosophy. While he discovered early that his primary interests were theoretical, he always displayed, to the end of his life, great practical abilities. He had also studied engineering, and worked, from 1917 to 1920, as a physicist and engineer in the scientific laboratory of a radio firm in Berlin. Throughout his life he retained and used many of his practical skills as a hobby in his home and workshop. In 1926, he was appointed, with the recommendations of Einstein and Planck, to the position of Associate Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1933 he left Germany, as did many eminent scientists and scholars, for political reasons, and went to Istanbul as a Professor of Philosophy. In 1938 he was invited to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became the most distinguished professor in the Department of Philosophy and one of the most distinguished members of the faculty at the University.
His influence was, of course, particularly great in the Department of Philosophy, where his colleagues acknowledged gratefully the impetus provided by his outstanding work, and where he was most successful in stimulating and supervising the work of more than a dozen Ph.D. candidates during the last ten years. But his influence extended throughout the University. He maintained close connections with other departments, especially the Department of Physics, where he taught a graduate course in statistical mechanics during World War II. He also served on numerous doctoral and promotion committees, at one time was a member of the Graduate Council, later a member of the Research Lecture Committee, and was himself appointed Faculty Research Lecturer in 1946, the second philosopher upon whom this honor has been bestowed.
This formal listing, however, cannot convey the true measure of his impact upon the University and upon his students, which was expressed as much through daily personal contact with him as through the force of his ideas and his amazing productivity. He was a most successful lecturer on all levels of instruction, and communicated to all his students, whether undergraduate or advanced, his own personal conception of philosophy as a rigorous scientific pursuit demanding intellectual integrity, logical precision, and indefatigable research. He taught as much by the personal example he set as by the distinguished work he accomplished.
The major intellectual influences in his own life and thought came from outside philosophy, a fact which was responsible for some of his most outstanding contributions to philosophy. He was an expert in physics and mathematics, and his philosophical contributions centered around and consistently returned to the borderline between science and philosophy; in particular, to the two great theoretical developments in contemporary physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Philosophy was for him the logical and epistemological reconstruction of scientific knowledge; and to this task he devoted his entire work with remarkable consistency throughout his life.
The first book he published was on Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis a priori (1920); and to the problem of interpreting and clarifying the logical foundations of relativity, involving the basic concepts of space, time, and causality, he returned in several major works: Axiomatik der relativistischen Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1924); From Copernicus to Einstein (1927; American edition, 1942); Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1928; an English translation to be published posthumously); Atom and Cosmos (1930; translated into four languages); Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie (1931). At the time of his death he was completing another comprehensive work on the nature of time, with special emphasis on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and information theory.
His dissertation (1915) was concerned with an analysis of the concept of probability, written still under the influence of the philosophy of Kant. The theory of probability continued to engage him throughout his life, stimulated by his analysis of the meaning of scientific truth and prediction, the problem of induction, the status of causality and probability in quantum mechanics, and culminating in the monumental work, The Theory of Probability (1935; revised English edition, 1949), and in the application of his system of three-valued logic to the Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1944). This extensive and basic work in the logical analysis of science was prepared and incorporated in epistemological and logical studies such as Experience and Prediction (1938) and Elements of Symbolic Logic (1947).
It is impossible to do justice to the enormous productivity of Hans Reichenbach or to the full significance of his work. In the philosophy of science he had few who were his equal; and the body of his work represents original philosophical thinking of the highest quality, indispensable to any student in the field and leaving a lasting mark upon the progress of science and philosophy. His publications in scientific journals alone consist of over eighty titles, many of which, like his books, appeared in several languages. However, in addition to the technical works he wrote, he was also singularly gifted in translating complex and abstract ideas into simple, clear language intelligible to the nonspecialist. He frequently contributed to nonscientific papers and journals; the book Atom and Cosmos grew out of a series of talks given over the Berlin radio; a recent work, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), was a selection of the Book Find Club. This rare ability of being at once a skilled expert, an original thinker, and a responsible popularizer immensely increased his effectiveness as a teacher. By virtue of this combination he was himself the best example of his conviction that the primary task of philosophy was to make our ideas as clear as possible.
He made other noteworthy contributions to philosophy. In Berlin he founded a circle of scientific philosophy and became Coeditor--with R. Carnap, a member of the Vienna circle--of the journal Erkenntnis; Annalen der Philosophie, a highly influential voice in the development of scientific philosophy and logical empiricism, later transplanted to this country as the Journal of Unified Science. He also retained close contact with numerous scholars and scientists throughout this country and the world. Only last year (1952), he gave a series of lectures at the Institut Henri Poincaré, Sorbonne, Paris. This year, at the time of his death, he had been invited to give the William James Lectures at Harvard.
While the loss of Hans Reichenbach is truly immeasurable to the Department of Philosophy and to the University, the body of his work and distinguished achievements will continue to be alive in the scientific world, because they have already become a permanent part of contemporary philosophy.
A. Kaplan
H. Meyerhoff
P. Friedlander
E. Kinsey
This University of California obituary is available at THIS LINK