Abstract
In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U.S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. In this paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Whereas existing work on the American reception of logical empiricism predominantly focuses on the way in which U.S. philosophy changed after they left Europe, this paper uses the academic archives of a range of European and American philosophers to show that we can get a better understanding of the development of logical empiricism if we look Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s exchanges with American scholars in the years before they left Europe. In addition, I argue that some of Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s work from the mid-1930s—in particular “Testability and Meaning” (Carnap 1936/1937) and Experience and Prediction (Reichenbach 1938)—can be better understood if we take into account (1) their attempts to correct the American narrative about logical positivism and (2) their increasingly desperate efforts to find a position in the United States.

Biography
Sander Verhaegh is Assistant Professor and NWO Veni Fellow at the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS) at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His research focuses on the history of analytic philosophy, the history of psychology, and the philosophy of science. In the past few years, he mainly worked on the nature and development of Quine’s philosophical naturalism. This project has resulted in the monograph Working from Within: The Nature and Development of Quine’s Naturalism, (OUP, 2018), as well as publications in, among others, Erkenntnis, Philosophers’ Imprint, Synthese, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Currently, he is working on a book about the development of logical empiricism in the United States (under contract at Oxford University Press). The manuscript reconstructs the American reception of scientific philosophy in the years before and after the great intellectual migration and maps its impact on the rapid development of analytic philosophy after the Second World War.