A short history of the archival partnership Konstanz-Pittsburgh

The story from Pittsburgh's point of view

By Lance Lugar, Curator, Archives of Scientific Philosophy – October 2020

Reasons, Timing and First Collections for the Archive

This essay will present a brief history of the Archives of Scientific Philosophy (ASP) held by the University of Pittsburgh Library System from its founding in the early 1970s as a research unit of the University Library System to the present. The intent will be to consider the reasons for the founding of the archive, to examine the initial goals, collection policies, and first acquisitions that led to its establishment as well as examining the evolution of these elements over time.  The context of the founding will also be discussed as an important element of the final form of the ASP. It will then take up the way in which the evolution of the policies for acquisition allowed the ASP to expand its areas of acquisition enabling it to accommodate the evolution of philosophy of science in the later 20th century and thus to continue to be a useful teaching and research resource for the Departments of Philosophy and of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. This nuancing of the acquisition parameters then allowed the ASP to continue to fulfill the goals of the founders. The initial thematic emphases for the collection and the subsequent expansion of that collection goal will be examined to show how they reflected the growth and development of philosophy of science during the 20th century. A brief précis of the component collections and the history of their acquisition will be presented.

ESTABLISHMENT

The Archives for Scientific Philosophy (ASP) at the University of Pittsburgh was founded in 1974 as a research-oriented unit within the University Library System. From the beginning, the ASP was intended to be and designed to become a useful research and teaching resource for the Departments of Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science. Hence establishing a solid core of materials from important philosophers from the early part of the 20th century and then expanding the collection size and importance by acquiring late 20th century philosophers with a coherent program of philosophical inquiry related to the early logical positivists would functionally expand its utility by providing materials illustrating the development of philosophical thought about the nature of science and scientific thought in the later 20th and early 21st century. The decision of what to collect – of which philosophers and historians of science to acquire for the ASP – therefore would reflect not only the philosophical and historical importance of various lines of thought in 20th century philosophy, but also would direct the choices of what to acquire subsequently.    

The founding of the ASP was an element of the transformation of the Department of Philosophy and Department of History and Philosophy of Science into world renowned departments that were among the most distinguished in the profession. This transformation was engineered by faculty members of the two departments, such as Adolf Grünbaum, Nicholas Rescher, Larry Laudan, and Kurt Baier. These faculty members were strong supporters of the establishment of the ASP. The transformation entailed philosophers of the stature of Wilfrid Sellars, Alan Ross Anderson, and other leading philosophical thinkers joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. 

The first archival collection acquired was that of the philosopher Rudolf Carnap. This acquisition was a result of the collection policy formulated for the ASP regarding the topical focus of the collection; the initial collections were to be of papers from the major European philosophers who founded Logical Positivism – Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach notably among them.  

Hence it was a straightforward move to acquire the archival papers of Hans Reichenbach as a second acquisition for the newly founded ASP as Reichenbach was the leading light and founder of the Berlin School in philosophy of science. The Berlin School was importantly involved in the development of logical positivism.

Both Carnap and Reichenbach were not only leading original thinkers in 20th century philosophy but also teachers and mentors to many important thinkers of subsequent academic generations. The lineages established have continued to shape philosophy of science to the present day.

The choice of Logical Positivism’s founding philosophers as a starting point.

Logical Positivism was an important 20th century philosophical movement – perhaps the most important intellectual current in early and middle 20th century philosophy of science. The basic ideas that characterize the school arose in the early part of the 20th century and reached the height of its influence in Europe in the period spanning the late 1920s through the early 1930s. It was initially centered in Austria and Germany with the principal centers of activity in Vienna and Berlin. One group of the founding figures including philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap were part of the Vienna Circle, but another important group centered around Hans Reichenbach who, together with C. G. Hempel, were principal figures in the Berlin School – which at that time was termed the Society for Empirical Philosophy. Logical Positivism flourished in Europe for over a decade and a half following the First World War. The rise of the Nazi party to prominence in Germany in 1933 eventually caused many of the leading thinkers of the movement to leave Germany and Austria. Many of these émigrés found their way to the United States. They had an important influence on American philosophy and philosophy of science starting in the late 1930s and continuing to the present day. 

In addition to the importance of Logical Positivism and the relative ease of acquisition of such materials, the University Pittsburgh had other reasons to acquire material documenting the history of Logical Positivism. One of these would be the circumstance that the philosophers involved, especially Carnap, Reichenbach, and Hempel were exploring ideas in philosophy of science that had been of interest and concern to earlier philosophers such as Kant. Hence, they were not only important ideas in philosophy, but central questions to the endeavors in philosophy of science since the late 18th century. This continuity was important to the founders because many of the University of Pittsburgh faculty in Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science were either members of the Berlin School or were pupils of Hans Reichenbach – Wesley Salmon was a prominent example of a pupil and Karl Hempel was a member of the Berlin School who spent time at the University of Pittsburgh.

One of the principal projects of the Logical Positivists and the Berlin School thinkers was the placing of philosophy of science on a rigorous linguistic foundation. This entailed, in their view, creation of a language free from the ambiguities and imprecision of ordinary language; hence putting philosophical language into a mathematical form as establishing a way of creating unambiguous and clear communication was a primary objective.

  1. Vienna Circle:  The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Kurt Gödel, Otto Neurath and others who participated in the group founded by Moritz Schlick. Among the most distinguished philosophically oriented scientists and scientifically oriented philosophers (Eisenthal) they were exploring ways to move the philosophy of science in a direction that enabled it to create a language for science that was free from the ambiguities of ordinary language as possible – to achieve this goal they worked to create a language rooted in the discipline of Logic.
  2. Berlin Group:  Hans Reichenbach also formed a group of philosophers who met to discuss topics in philosophy of science. Their interests and intent ran parallel to the goals of the Vienna Circle, although Reichenbach and Carnap had slightly different approaches to the solution.

Both groups were interested in absorbing the lessons of Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity as a way of considering the major questions of philosophy of science.

Hence a long-term goal of the collecting policy of the ASP was to include the archival papers of as many members of the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Group was possible. The acquisition of the Carnap, Reichenbach, and Hempel papers fit easily into this collecting goal. Other archives, such as the Ramsey Archive, represent philosophers and philosophers of science whose work was important to the early development of 20th century philosophy who were not necessarily logical positivists in all respects, yet who were within the developing analytic tradition.

Who was involved in the founding of the ASP? 

The establishment of the ASP was a coordinated effort of prominent professors from several departments, principally the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science Department. One aspect of the founding was the intent to provide a resource that would facilitate research on prominent philosophers who founded the Vienna-based Logical Positivists, such as Rudolf Carnap and the Berlin School’s Hans Reichenbach. Professors from the department of Philosophy, such as Nicholas Rescher, Kurt Baier, and Adolf Grünbaum were involved from the beginning of the process and were central to its success. 

Faculty members from other departments were also involved in the founding of the ASP.  As the logical positivists regarded physics as the pre-eminent science, members of the Physics faculty, such as Allen Janis, a prominent relativity theorist, were also involved in the discussions.

As the ASP unit was to be activated as a working department within the University Library System, there needed to be extensive involvement of both senior ULS administrators and specialist library faculty members.

Order of collection acquisition

Carnap: The initial plan for the acquisition of materials for the ASP, as mentioned above, involved acquiring the professional archives of one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century – Rudolf Carnap. Born in Germany, Carnap studied logic with Gottlob Frege and was strongly influenced by Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. The Carnap papers are the founding papers of the ASP and were acquired as a result of negotiations that took place during 1974 by representatives of the University of Pittsburgh and the owner of the papers - Hannah Thost, who was Carnap’s daughter.

Reichenbach: Hans Reichenbach was one of the most prominent figures in the Logical Empiricists of the Berlin school.  At the time of the early development of the Logical Positivist movement, he was associated with the University of Berlin. There, the group called itself the Society for Empirical Philosophy. While the goals of the Society for Empirical Philosophy were congruent with the goals of the Vienna Circle, there were some philosophic differences.

Ramsey:  Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher whose work in mathematics, economics, and philosophy has been of fundamental importance up to the present day. He was highly regarded by Ludwig Wittgenstein and was, in addition to being a first rank philosopher in his own right, instrumental in helping Wittgenstein to move to Cambridge to continue teaching.

Rand: Rose Rand’s collection is an important addition to the ASP’s holdings. Trained as philosopher in Vienna, Rand kept meticulous and copious notes about meetings of the members of the Vienna Circle and provides a valuable sociological record of their doings. Her Nachlass has also become an important resource in studying topics such as women’s roles in the sciences in the 1930s in Europe and other aspects of women’s history.

Second Stage - Expansion of Criteria to accompany evolution of 20th century HPS

As the discipline of philosophy of science evolved in the latter half of the 20th century, Logical Positivism was succeeded by other, sometimes descendent, schools of philosophy, such as Natural Language philosophy. Many themes and tenets of Logical Positivism were developed, questioned, and challenged. The ASP has broadened its criteria in order to maintain the original goal of the founders of the ASP; the goal is still to provide a research collection of value to the education of graduate students in philosophy and in the history and philosophy of science as well as a resource for researchers in philosophy, history, and history of philosophy.

New Criteria allowed for the ASP

As the ASP evolved, the selection criteria changed. Following Nicholas Rescher’s explication of the Berlin School and its lineage in academic philosophy, it seemed reasonable to acquire thinkers who were either later members of the Berlin School or were students of members, both junior and senior, of the Berlin School. Hence several philosophers, such as Hempel, Jeffrey, and Rescher, were straightforward examples of important philosophers who might add to the strength of the collection. 

While the first collections policy emphasized the acquisition of papers that would document the origin and early evolution of the Logical Positivist movement and the contributions of its founding thinkers working in Vienna and Berlin, it was soon found that it was desirable to add the papers of philosophers who had views that were either descended from, related to, but sometimes significantly at variance with those of the Logical Positivists from the Vienna Circle and Berlin Group. While this initially focused on thinkers who were trained by the first logical positivists or their intellectual lineal descendants, it was also deemed advisable to acquire the papers of thinkers whose intellectual connections with these thinkers were important either as influences or as representatives of positions taken in opposition to those advocated by the Logical positivists.

In addition, in an article on the Berlin School that formed around Hans Reichenbach, Nicholas Rescher pointed out the strong connection between the members of the Berlin School and many of the philosophers of science gathered at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Philosophy and Department of History and Philosophy of Science; this link was rooted in their membership in a lineage of thinkers who were either members of the Berlin School or as pupils of these members. This linking suggested that by acquiring the papers of thinkers who had strong connections to the Vienna Circle and Berlin School philosophers, and their academic descendants, the Archive could begin to document the transition away from Logical Positivism that had begun in the 1960s. 

One of the most important later acquisitions was the archival material of Wilfrid S. Sellars.  Most straightforwardly this follows from the nature of Sellars’ work: for a time Sellars developed ideas that were directly involved in creating a philosophy with roots in 20th century analytic philosophy and logical positivism. Sellars is often regarded as one of leading epistemologists of the 20th century and his entire body of work established him as one of the two or three most important American philosophers of the 20th century. He represents a group of thinkers who did not necessarily accept the basic precepts and goals of logical positivism but interacted fruitfully with it.

For the same reasons that motivated the inclusion of the Sellars papers, when it became possible in the 1980s for the ASP to acquire the complete scientific archival materials of the very important British philosopher Frank Ramsey, Dr. Nicholas Rescher arranged to add these papers to the ASP as Ramsey had contributed valuable work to early 20th century that was developmentally connected to later work in Logical Positivism and the thought of philosophers in the Berlin School lineage.

One of the most active and important areas of late 20th and early 21st century Philosophy of Science has been the sub-discipline of philosophy of biology. Since the year 2000, the ASP has added the archival papers of David Hull, Elizabeth Lloyd, and Lindley Darden which gives the ASP a strength in 20th century philosophy of biology. Both archives are extensive and provide material important to historians of philosophy of science, and to other scholars.

Three other recent major acquisitions are the correspondence and related material of philosopher of science, Ernest Nagel, the archive of philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, and the papers of Nuel Belnap. Nagel's eminence is reflected in the wide array of correspondents in his archival holdings; philosophers, scientists and historians who shaped philosophy of science, physics, mathematics and other important areas of 20th century thought are represented, often with extensive exchanges in the correspondence. Adolf Grünbaum's important work in the philosophy of space and time, of physics, of psychoanalysis, as well as his work in many other areas are extensively documented from working papers, calculations, autograph drafts, correspondence, and other artifacts such as notebooks.

The story from Konstanz's point of view

A testimony by Gereon Wolters, co-founder of the Philosophical Archive at the University of Konstanz .

Background

In 1978, Peter Schroeder-Heister (now in Tübingen), a PhD student, and I, a junior Postdoc, carried out the DFG project “Cataloging and textual analysis of Hugo Dingler's (1881-1954) literary estate". The project was initiated by the fact that the majority of philosophy professors at Konstanz had scholarly ties to the "Erlangen School of Methodical Constructivism". For this reason it is sometimes called the "Erlangen-Konstanz school". This school, initiated by Paul Lorenzen (1915-1994) and Wilhelm Kamlah (1905-1976), drew its conception of philosophy of science from Dingler's work. It is perhaps the most significant alternative to Logical Empiricism and the latter's development into today's analytic philosophy. Schroeder and I examined Dingler's copious estate in the home of Dingler's widow Martha (1913-1982) in Aschaffenburg over some weeks and made copies of scholarly relevant parts with a copy machine leased specifically for this task. The copies we brought to Konstanz. Reading Dingler's diaries aroused in me the suspicion that the texts rejecting Relativity Theory by physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916) could have been forgeries. In the resulting habilitation project I would go on to identify further scholarly estates by people surrounding Dingler and, additionally, as-yet-unknown Machiana.  

PAUK is founded 

It was an idea of my doctoral supervisor Jürgen Mittelstraß that I should build an archive, starting with the copies of the Dingler estate. This idea would have never occurred to me personally, therefore Mittelstraß should count as the founder of the Philosophical Archive of the University of Konstanz (PAUK), which in 1979 was still modestly called "Dingler-Archive" and did amount to nothing more than a storage room for the documents. In the following years, the archive grew in size through a number of acquisitions, which were initially tied to my own research activities, like family documents of Carnap's son Johannes. The most important one, however, was the estate of Hans Jonas (1903-1993), whose delivery I arranged in 1989 with Jonas himself. 

Institutionally speaking, the Dingler-Archive became the PAUK in 1985. The history of the archive took an important turn in 1990. In Konstanz, the central actor is once again Jürgen Mittelstraß. Since he had received (and had rejected) an offer from the University of Pittsburgh in 1975, there was a rapport with Pittsburgh philosophers such as Nicholas Rescher, Adolf Grünbaum, Larry Laudan and Wesley Salmon. These contacts led, on the initiative of Gerald J. Massey, then director of the "Center for Philosophy of Science", to an official cooperation agreement with Pittsburgh in 1990. The terms secured, among others, the delivery of copies of the collections of the "Archives for Scientific Philosophy" (ASP) at the University of Pittsburgh. The financial feasibility was made possible by Mittelstraß' donation of a substantial part of the Leibniz-Prize he had received in 1989 and which was used for the creation of microfilm copies. At the same time, the PAUK became part of the "Center for Philosophy and philosophy of science of the University of Konstanz" established by Mittelstraß in 1990. 

The turn in 1990 also brought about a professionalization of the archive's activities: In 1991, Brigitte Uhlemann became the dedicated archivist of PAUK, a position she held for 28 years, until 2019. In close cooperation with the ASP, she coordinated the transition from analog to digital archiving, transcribed shorthand documents, organized and indexed new acquisitions, organized conferences related to the archival collections and, last but not least, looked after the ever rising number of PAUK users from all over the world.  

In the years following 1990, important acquisitions were made, such as the holdings of Oskar Becker (1887-1964) and Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994). The latest acquisition is the estate of noted logician Georg Kreisel (1923-2015), which was donated to PAUK by Paul Weingartner (Salzburg) in 2015. The Erlangen School, which started it all, is represented by the estates of  Wilhelm Kamlah (1905-1976) and Paul Lorenzen (1915-1994) as well as the pre-mortem bequests of Kuno Lorenz (1932*) und Friedrich Kambartel (1935*). Additionally, the PAUK holds copies from other archives, such as the "Archives for the History of Quantum Mechanics" and the "Kurt Gödel papers" (1906-1978).

In 1996, the PAUK was incorporated into the University Library (now KIM Communication, Information, Media Centre) of Konstanz, in order to make it independent from the continued existence of the Center for Philosophy and Philosophy of Science.

Currently, the PAUK is co-managed by university archivist Daniel Wilhelm.

Further reading

Heverly, W. (2005). Virtual repatriation: The Pittsburgh-Konstanz archival partnership. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 6(1), 34-43.

Nachlass of Rudolf Carnap given to the University of Pittsburgh

Rudolf Carnap was a central figure in the Vienna Circle and made substantial contributions in the areas of constructional theories, physicalism, the epistemological foundations of physics and mathematics, the syntactical structure of language, semantics, modal logic, and probability theory. Throughout his career he stressed the importance of formal analysis as the key to solving philosophical problems. His papers include extensive correspondence covering his entire life and career, lecture outlines for courses that he taught in Vienna, Prague, and the U.S.; and manuscript drafts and typescripts both for his published works and for many unpublished writings.

Establishment of the Archives of Scientific Philosophy (ASP) within the University of Pittsburgh Library System

The estates of Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach are brought together with support from the Center for Philosophy of Science (Gerald J. Massey).

June: Hans Reichenbach Papers

Hans Reichenbach was an influential philosopher of science, educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. He founded the Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie (Society for Empirical Philosophy) in Berlin in 1928, also known as the Berlin Circle. Throughout his career Reichenbach made lasting contributions to the analysis of probabilistic reasoning; logic and the philosophy of mathematics; quantum mechanics; and space, time, and relativity theory. The Hans Reichenbach Papers comprise published and unpublished manuscripts, lectures, correspondence, photographs, drawings, LP recordings of lectures, and related materials from his early student days until his death.

June: Richard Nollan becomes the first Curator of the Archives of Scientific Philosophy

September: Frank Plumpton Ramsey Papers

This is a collection of autograph manuscripts documenting the philosophical work of Frank Plumpton Ramsey between the years 1920 and 1930. Ramsey was one of the most important British analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. During his career he worked in the areas of philosophy of mathematics, symbolic logic, epistemology, economics, and probability theory. The collection contains drafts of Ramsey's papers, including drafts of two of the most important and influential of Ramsey's works, The Foundations of Mathematics and On a Problem of Formal Logic. There are notes on the Tractatus of Ludwig Wittgenstein. There are also papers, notes, and drafts of works on topics in philosophy of mathematics, formal logic, economics, and political theory. Some of Ramsey's undergraduate essays are also found in the collection.

January: Ludwig Wittgenstein Papers [microfilm]

Ludwig Wittgenstein worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of the mind and the philosophy of language. His work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book that Wittgenstein published during his lifetime, claimed to solve all the major problems of philosophy and was held in especially high esteem by the anti-metaphysical logical positivists. The Tractatus is based on the idea that philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of the logic of language, and it tries to show what this logic is. Wittgenstein’s later work, principally his Philosophical Investigations, shares this concern with logic and language, but takes a different, less technical, approach to philosophical problems. This work helped to inspire so-called ordinary language philosophy.

The Philosophical Archive of the University of Konstanz (PAUK) is established

On suggestion of Jürgen Mittelstraß, the estate of Hugo Dingler (in copy) and part of Ernst Mach's estate are brought together into an archive. The material had been collected by Gereon Wolters for research purposes within the department of philosophy. He also takes on the management of the PAUK.

December: W. Gerald Heverly succeeds Richard Nollan as the Curator of the Archives of Scientific Philosophy

January: The Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP) [microfilm]

The Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP), consists of several hundred reels of microfilm copies of correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, research notebooks, and other primary source documents, as well as the transcripts of over one hundred taped interviews (oral histories) of physical scientists who revolutionized physics during the first decades of the twentieth century.

ASP hires a dedicated curator

W. Gerald Heverly is hired as a dedicated curator for the ASP.

ASP get (too) popular

Almost half of the users of ASP are researchers from Europe - and rising. The time effort and financial strain on the side of the researchers as well as the ASP grows; a solution is sought. A plan is devised to permit access to a copy of the archival collections in Europe.

January: Agreement of Archival Collaboration is signed; a new home for the PAUK

On January 16th, 1990 the chief operating officers of the Universities of Pittsburgh and Konstanz, Chancellor Wesley Posvar and Rector Horst Sund, sign an agreement to facilitate the exchange of expertise and collections (in form of microfilm copies) between the archives of their respective universities.

The PAUK becomes part of the "Center for Philosophy and Philosophy of Science" founded by Mittelstraß in 1990.

February: Rose Rand Papers

Rose Rand was a student member of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers who met on a regular basis for discussions in Vienna, Austria, from 1922 to 1938, and who proposed new philosophical ideas and theories about the conception of scientific knowledge. The papers comprise Rose Rand's personal and professional records, a significant amount of correspondence and working papers, as well as notebooks, research notes, manuscript fragments, and transcriptions from Vienna Circle discussions. They also include 48 annotated books from her personal library.

Carnap-Reichenbach Centenary in Konstanz; PAUK hires a dedicated archivist

Brigitte Parakenings (former name Uhlemann) is hired as the main archivist of the PAUK.

May: The Carnap-Reichenbach Centenary (May 21-24 in Konstanz) marks the beginning of the Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium series

August: Wilfrid S. Sellars Papers

Wilfrid S. Sellars was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to Philosophy of Science, Epistemology, and many other areas within philosophy. He was particularly noted for his contributions to Metaphysics and to Philosophy of Mind. The collection consists of manuscripts of nearly all of Sellars’ work (including autograph manuscripts of many these texts), reading notes, preliminary notes for further development, drafts of articles, working papers, correspondence, teaching materials, lecture notes, his personal library, and a collection of dictabelt recordings of drafts of essays, talks, and correspondence (1963-1980). The correspondence includes exchanges with many of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. There are also Ph.D. theses for students supervised by Sellars, personal correspondence, and drafts and typescripts for materials written by other philosophers. Materials from the work of Roy Wood Sellars can also be found here.

Transfer of expertise between Pittsburgh and Konstanz

ASP team members visit Konstanz on several occasions to help with further training of the PAUK team on site.

January: Philosophy of Science Association

The Philosophy of Science Association (PSA) is an American academic organization which promotes the study and discussion of the philosophy of science. Founded in 1933, the PSA engages in activities such as the publishing of periodicals, essays and monographs in the field of the philosophy of science; sponsoring conventions and meetings; and the awarding of prizes for distinguished work in the field. Records include correspondence of presidents and PSA journal secretaries and manuscripts submitted to the journal.

February: Bruno De Finetti Papers

Bruno de Finetti was an Italian probability theorist and statistician, noted for the "operational subjective" conception of probability. He provided significant contributions to the theory and the foundations of probability, and his work laid the foundation for the modern subjectivist interpretation of probability. The papers include de Finetti's student notebooks, research papers, lecture and teaching notes, professional and administrative records, newspaper clippings, personal and professional correspondence, and volumes of books from his personal library.

October: Colloquium on Philosophy of Biology

The second Colloquium on "Philosophy of Biology" takes place October 1st-4th in Pittsburgh.

June: Paul Hertz Papers

Paul Hertz, a German physicist and philosopher of science, made significant contributions to the foundations of mathematics and axiomatics and achieved important results for the foundations of mathematical logic. His investigations were the precursor to various later researches in this area. The papers consists of correspondence, biographical material, manuscripts, offprints, and books from his library. Hertz's correspondence numbers over 100 letters, many with prominent individuals like Max Abraham, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, and Moritz Schlick.

May: Colloquium on Philosophy and the Sciences of the Mind

The third Colloquium on "Philosophy and the Sciences of the Mind" takes place May 17th-20th in Konstanz.

ASP hire an assistant curator; PAUK becomes part of Konstanz university library

Brigitta Arden is hired as assistant curator of the ASP. 

PAUK becomes part of the Konstanz university library, which now continues as part of the Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM).

Brigitta Arden becomes the Associate Curator of the Archives of Scientific Philosophy

April: Herbert Feigl Papers

Herbert Feigl was born in 1902 in Reichenberg, Bohemia, and was one of the leading proponents of logical positivism and a member of the Vienna Circle. He also made significant contributions in the field of contemporary materialism and made extensive use of advances in physiological psychology. The papers comprise correspondence and manuscripts including exchanges with Bar-Hillel, Carnap, Einstein, Frank, Hempel, Hook, Neurath, Oppenheim, Reichenbach, Russell, and other twentieth century thinkers. Included are also notes and lectures outlines as well as an extensive collection of his published and unpublished papers that discuss social issues and philosophical problems in psychology.

October: Colloquium on Science at the End of the Century: The limits of science

The fourth Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium on "Science at the End of the Century: The limits of science" takes place 3rd-7th October in Pittsburgh.

April: Carl Gustav Hempel Papers

Carl Gustav Hempel was a philosopher of science who played a central role in the development of logical positivism. His work is primarily associated with the concept of deductive-nomological explanation and with the Raven paradox. The papers include biographical material, correspondence, research and lecture manuscripts, teaching documents, and offprints by him and others, mostly stemming from his post-immigration period in the U.S.

May: Colloquium on Philosophical Problems in the Neurosciences

The fifth Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium "Philosophical Problems in the Neurosciences" takes place May 26th-29th in Konstanz.

June: Arthur Benson Papers

Arthur J. Benson, an associate professor at California State University at Los Angeles, was a student and later friend and colleague of Rudolf Carnap. This collection holds some papers of his student and professional years, as well as manuscripts and correspondence relating to Rudolf Carnap’s life and work.

May: Robert E. Butts Papers

Robert Earl Butts was a philosopher of science whose research interests included the work of Leibniz, Newton, Galileo, Whewell, and Kant. He spent most of his career as a faculty member at the University of Western Ontario and was active in professional organizations and publications in the history and philosophy of science. The papers consist of biographical materials, including educational documents, early writings and schoolwork, photographs, correspondence, and memorabilia; and professional materials, including correspondence, research and lecture notes, records of publications and professional organizations, and unpublished drafts.

W. Gerald Heverly, Curator for the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, leaves Pitt

G. Lance Lugar becomes the Curator for the Archives of Scientific Philosophy

October: Colloquium on Science, Values, and Objectivity

The sixth Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium on "Science, Values, and Objectivity" takes place October 3rd-6th in Pittsburgh. 

January: Wesley Salmon Papers

Wesley C. Salmon was an historian and philosopher of science who made major contributions to current ideas of scientific explanation, causation, and the nature of induction and probability among other areas of philosophy of science. Salmon was a professor at several major institutions including Indiana University, the University of Arizona and the University of Pittsburgh. The materials in his collection include personal and professional correspondence, manuscripts, working papers, lecture notes and their ancillary materials, versions of professional talks, and documentation from his work in professional organizations. There are also documents relating to his role in academic administration. Further, there are teaching materials and memorabilia.

August: Richard Jeffrey Papers

Richard C. Jeffrey, an American philosopher, logician, and probability theorist, represents one of the most influential philosophers working in decision theory. He was also a major advocate of developing and securing the heritage of logical empiricism, himself championing 'radical probabilism', a view that denies objective probability and abandons attempts to analyze judgment into a rational and an empirical component.

February: David Hull Papers

This material documents the philosophical activity of David L. Hull between the years 1965-2003. This period encompasses the whole of his professional career and extends into his retirement. The material consists of letters, manuscripts, surveys, background materials for the research surveys, overheads for talks, data sheets, and other texts generated by his professional career. His works address philosophical problems in and historical explication of many areas of biology including classification, taxonomy, theoretical systematics, evolutionary theory, historical biology, and ecology.

May: Colloquium on Causation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

The seventh Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium on "Causation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives" takes place May 26th-29th in Konstanz.

January: Jay F. Rosenberg Papers

Jay Rosenberg's work focused on such philosophical topics as Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, History of Philosophy and the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. As he worked closely with Wilfrid Sellars, the collection also contains manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs of Sellars, his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, and at conferences.

April: Ronald Anderson Papers

Ronald Anderson was a member of the Society of Jesus, a physicist, and a philosopher of science. He studied particle physics with Girish Joshi at the University of Melbourne for his PhD in Physics. He then studied with Abner Shimony at Boston University for his PhD in Philosophy. He joined the faculty of Boston College as an Assistant Professor in 1987 and he then served as an Associate Professor from his promotion in 1993 until his death in 2007. Anderson's areas of specialization included particle physics, the history of electromagnetism, the philosophy of physics, and the philosophy of mathematics.

October: Colloquium on Interpretation

The eighth Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium on "Interpretation" takes place October 3rd-4th in Pittsburgh.

March: Nicholas Rescher Papers

Nicholas Rescher is an American philosopher in the analytic school of twentieth century philosophy who is the author of well over 100 professional books on various topics such process metaphysics, philosophy of subjectivity, epistemology, history of philosophy, logic, and many other active areas of inquiry in current philosophy. His professional articles explore these and many other aspects of philosophy. He has an interest in the mathematics of cryptology and using archival materials found in the Leibniz archive, facilitated the construction of the encryption machine Leibniz had designed. Rescher joined the Faculty of the University of Pittsburgh's Philosophy Department in 1961 and has remained an active member to the present. He has served as Chairman of the Department and has been an early and important supporter of the Center for Philosophy of Science, serving variously as an Associate Director, Director, and Chairman of the Center.  He was instrumental in acquiring the collection of Frank Plumpton Ramsey for the Archives of Scientific Philosophy.

November: Abner Shimony Papers

Abner Shimony, an American philosopher of science and physicist, focused much of his work in both philosophy of science and in physics on the interaction between quantum mechanics and relativity theory. He has done substantial research on complementarity in multiparticle quantum interferometry and in quantum entanglement. He has written books and research articles on the foundations of quantum mechanics. For his work in Philosophy of Science, he was awarded the 1996 Lakatos Prize.

Hans Reichenbach Library and Maria Reichenbach Papers

After Hans Reichenbach’s death in 1953, his second wife, Maria Reichenbach, philosophy faculty at LA City College until 1974, continued as editor and translator of her husband’s work, beginning with The Direction of Time (1956). After her death, Hans Reichenbach’s personal library was moved to Pittsburgh, as well as her own philosophical papers, in addition to further offprints, photographs, and papers from her husband.

July: Elisabeth Lloyd Papers

Elisabeth Lloyd is an American philosopher of science whose work is centered on the field of philosophy of biology. The materials extend over the whole of her career and include manuscript materials, working notes on articles and books in progress, professional correspondence, teaching materials, documents relating to work with professional organizations, talks given to professional audiences, as well as annotated books, manuscripts and preprints.

November: James Woodward Papers

James Woodward is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the former president of the Philosophy of Science Association (2010-12), and J. O. and Juilette Koepfli Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His research mainly concerns causation and scientific explanation; he has also worked on philosophical issues in psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences. This collection is comprised of Woodward's notebooks which contain notes that he used for his publications.

December: Peter Machamer Papers

Machamer was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His work has been influential in philosophy of science in developing an account of mechanistic explanation which rejects standard deductive models of explanation, such as the deductive-nomological model by understanding scientific practice as the search for mechanisms. His research has also focused on 17th-century history of philosophy and science, on Galileo Galilei and René Descartes in particular, and on values and science. His work focuses upon using natural philosophy by these figures as a way of understanding their metaphysics and epistemology.

December: Isaac Levi Papers

Isaac Levi was a doctoral student of Ernest Nagel at Columbia University, completing a Ph.D. entitled Positivism and Realism in the Epistemology of Moritz Schlick in 1957 under Nagel's supervision. He also was given a Ph.D. Honoris Causa by Lund University in 1988.  After spending time on the faculties of the City College of New York and Case-Western Reserve University, Levi returned to Columbia University in 1970 where he would serve for nearly four decades as a professor in the Philosophy department. Over the course of his career Levi made important contributions to areas such as epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory and the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Fruitful debate between Levi and one of his colleagues and former students, Henry E. Kyburg Jr, resulted in an approach to certain philosophical questions that has come to be known as formal epistemology. He served as doctoral advisor to numerous prominent formal philosophers, among them Horacio Arló-Costa and Teddy Seidenfeld.

September: Brigitta Arden, Associate Curator of the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, leaves Pitt

February: Adolf Grünbaum Papers

Adolf Grünbaum was the author of nearly 400 articles and book chapters as well as books on space-time and the critique of psychoanalysis. He is often viewed as part of the American brand of logical empiricism associated especially with Hans Reichenbach. He was the first Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1960 until his death, and also served as Co-Chairman of its Center For Philosophy of Science (from 1978), Research Professor of Psychiatry (from 1979), and Primary Research Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (from 2006). His works include Philosophical Problems of Space and Time (1963), The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), and Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis (1993). His archives include correspondence, paper drafts, research materials, lecture notes, audio and video recordings of lectures and debates, and other magnetic media.

February: Nuel D. Belnap Papers

Nuel D. Belnap Jr. is an American philosopher who worked predominantly in the field of Logic. His papers include sections containing correspondence, sections containing the scholarly articles that he wrote, working notes, calculations and proofs, and other documents from the career of a professional academic philosopher. He took a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1960, titling his dissertation “The Formalization of Entailment”.  Throughout his career, he worked in many areas of logic, publishing extensively in the fields of structural proof theory and temporal logic. He collaborated with many distinguished logicians including Alan Ross Anderson, Anil Gupta, Thomas Steel, Joseph Camp, Dorothy Grover, Ming Xu, Michael Perloff, and others.  His work on relevance logic entitled Entailment, published in 1975, and written in collaboration with Alan Ross Anderson, as well as “The Revision Theory Truth”, co-authored with Anil Gupta, are examples of some of his most important work.  Other such examples include The Prosentential Theory of Truth written with Dorothy Grover and Joseph Camp.

PAUK archivist retires

Brigitte Parakenings retires as archivist of PAUK.

University archivist Daniel Wilhelm takes over PAUK's day-to-day operations.

August: Lindley Darden Papers

The professional papers and book collection of Lindley Darden, a contemporary philosopher of science and historian of biology. Darden received her PhD. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and served as Distinguished Scholar Teacher at the University of Maryland until her retirement in 2019. Her research focuses on reasoning in scientific change and investigating the conceptual aspects of discovery of biological mechanisms from the nineteenth through twenty-first century, such as evolutionary and genetic mechanisms. Darden’s work also explored the implications of such discoveries for science education, medicine, and environmental policy.

January: Ernest Nagel Papers

The Ernest Nagel papers contain professional correspondence received by Ernest Nagel, an American Philosopher of Science, who along with contemporaries Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel is one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement. His work concerned the philosophy of mathematical fields such as geometry and probability, quantum mechanics, and the status of reductive and inductive theories of science, and his book The Structure of Science is recognized as an inaugural work in the field of analytic philosophy of science. 

December: Jason M Rampelt is hired as History of Science and Medicine Archivist, including care of the Archives of Scientific Philosophy