Heidegger and Carnap: Disagreeing about Nothing?

The differences between Heidegger and the prominent Vienna Circle logical positivist Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) are frequently interpreted as an historical source of the division between a more speculatively and stylistically oriented “Continental philosophy” and a more scientific and logically oriented “Analytic philosophy. ” Nonetheless, Heidegger and Carnap shared a common intellectual context informed by the Southwest or Baden School of neo-Kantianism, Husserl’s phenomenology, the life-philosophy of Dilthey and Nietzsche, the projects of experiential, linguistic and Gestalt-psychological holism, an antagonism toward traditional metaphysics as a reification of life and lived-experience, a suspicion of overly theoretical epistemological and abstract ethical discourses, and also the German youth movement of the years following the First World War. Because of Carnap’s emphasis on applying the new formal logic pioneered by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell to philosophical questions, his commitment to creating a new more logically rigorous form of empiricism, as well as his advocacy...