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Carl Gustav Hempel
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Carl Gustav Hempel

American philosopher
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Quick Facts
Born:
January 8, 1905, Oranienburg, Germany
Died:
November 9, 1997, Princeton township, New Jersey, U.S. (aged 92)

Carl Gustav Hempel (born January 8, 1905, Oranienburg, Germany—died November 9, 1997, Princeton township, New Jersey, U.S.) was a German-born American philosopher, formerly a member of the Berlin school of logical positivism, a group that viewed logical and mathematical statements as revealing only the basic structure of language, but not essentially descriptive of the physical world.

Hempel attended several universities, including the University of Berlin (Ph.D., 1934), where he studied philosophy with Hans Reichenbach. With the growth of Nazi power in Germany, Hempel emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. He taught at Yale and Princeton universities and the University of Pittsburgh.

While probing the nature of theoretical science, Hempel advanced the precision of sociological concepts. His English writings include Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science (1952) and Philosophy of Natural Science (1966).

Agathon (centre) greeting guests in Plato's Symposium, oil on canvas by Anselm Feuerbach, 1869; in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Germany.
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