Tag Archives: geometry

Carnap’s Geometrical Methodology / Review of work on Venn

Volume 11.4 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access:

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/499

It features an article by Matteo De Benedetto, entitled “Carnap’s Geometrical Methodology: Explication as a transfer principle“. Here is the abstract:

In this paper, I will offer a novel perspective on Carnapian explication, understanding it as a philosophical analogue of the transfer principle methodology that originated in nineteenth-century projective geometry. Building upon the historical influence that projective geometry exerted on Carnap’s philosophy, I will show how explication can be modeled as a kind of transfer principle that connects, relative to a given task and normatively constrained by the desiderata chosen by the explicators, the functional properties of concepts belonging to different conceptual frameworks. Moreover, I will demonstrate how, in light of this characterization, we can better appreciate the evolution of Carnap’s metaphilosophy.

The volume also contains a review of John Venn: A Life in Logic, by Lukas M. Verburgt (University of Chicago Press, 2022), written by David E. Dunning.

JHAP is a free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!