CARL GUSTAV HEMPEL - American Philosophical Society

CARL GUSTAV HEMPEL
8 january 1905 . 9 november 1997
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 144, NO. 1, MARCH 2000

carl gustav hempel
CARL GUSTAV HEMPEL (who was known informally as
Peter) was a central figure in the development of logical
empiricism. He lived in “interesting” times, times that drove
him out of his native Germany, first to Belgium and then to the United
States. He studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the universities
of Göttingen, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Vienna, receiving his doctorate
in Berlin in 1934, just a week before Hitler assumed the mantle
of Führer-Reichskanzler. He had written most of his dissertation (on
the logical analysis of the concept of probability) under the supervision
of Hans Reichenbach when Reichenbach was abruptly dismissed from
his Berlin chair in 1933. (Hitler had just become chancellor.) The ensuing
problem of finding competent referees was sidestepped when Wolfgang
Köhler and Nicolai Hartmann agreed to serve nominally, in
Reichenbach’s place. By then, Hempel and his wife, Eva Ahrends, had
moved to Brussels, where his friend and collaborator Paul Oppenheim
had made it possible for them to support themselves.
In August 1937 they moved to Chicago, where Rudolf Carnap had
obtained a Rockefeller research fellowship for Hempel. In 1939–40 he
taught summer and evening courses at City College, New York, before
being appointed assistant professor at Queens College, New York,
where he, Donald Davidson, and Arnold Eisenberg were colleagues.
He left Queens College in 1948 to join Yale’s philosophy department.
It was in this period that Eva Ahrends died, shortly after giving birth to
their only child, Peter Andrew. Three years later, Peter married Diane
Perlow.
Hempel remained at Yale until 1955, when, after a semester’s visit,
he accepted Princeton’s invitation to join its philosophy department as
Stuart Professor of Philosophy, a post he held until mandatory retirement
at age sixty-eight, in 1973. He continued to teach at Princeton for
the next two years, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh as
university professor of philosophy in 1977. Upon his retirement from
Pittsburgh in 1985 he returned to Princeton, where he continued his
philosophical work for another decade. He died there on 9 November
1997 at the age of ninety-two.
Although himself of unexceptionable “Aryan” stock, Hempel
exhibited an insensitivity to such matters of a sort that constituted an
offense in Nazi Germany—so-called “Philosemitism”—an offense
against which his father and other well-wishers had warned him more
than once. Indeed, his wife Diane is Jewish, and his first wife, Eva, had
inherited “Jewish blood” from her father—as had his teacher, Reichenbach,
from his. That is what made Germany uninhabitable in 1934 for
him as for them, and made him slow to revisit the country after the
war.
[96]

iographical memoirs
As a university student he had been preparing himself to teach
mathematics in high school after receiving the doctorate. He thought
he would have enjoyed that life. At Princeton he chose to teach introductory
courses—Introduction to Logic and Introduction to the Philosophy
of Science, year after year, with an uncanny renewal of freshness
that amazed and inspired those who had the privilege of assisting him.
His graduate seminars, in which he brought novices to the point at
which they could make their own contributions, were models of what
such courses could be. His example created an environment in which
beginning and advanced students could thrive, and in which everyone
learned from everyone else. What lay behind his preference for the
introductory was not a logical empiricist’s sense that more advanced
students of vernacular philosophy would have been better off had they
known less, but a kind of love or reverence or care for naïve minds—a
sense, as he once put it, that they are the salt of the earth. Although he
had many students, he did not spawn doctrinal disciples. What students
carried away from him was a passion for clarity and a devotion
to rational argument.
Peter served as the Princeton philosophy department’s director of
graduate studies for decades. In his quiet way, he guided Princeton’s
graduate program, gradually transforming it into one that achieved
national prominence. With Thomas S. Kuhn and Charles C. Gillispie,
he shared in the glory years of Princeton’s Program in the History and
Philosophy of Science, culminating in a course in which undergraduates
were treated to the extraordinary experience of an introduction to
the philosophy of science taught by C. G. Hempel and T. S. Kuhn.
Personally, he was notably playful, incapable of stuffiness or cant.
There was no arrogance in him; he got no pleasure from proving people
wrong. His criticisms were always courteous, never triumphant.
This was deeply rooted in his character. He welcomed opportunities
for kindness and generosity and gave his whole mind to such projects
spontaneously, so that effort disappeared into zest. Diane was another
such player. (Once, in a restaurant, someone remarked on their politeness
to each other, and Diane said, “Ah, but you should see us when
we are alone together. [Pause] Then we are REALLY polite.”)
Many have marveled at his willingness to change his mind. Such
philosophical lightness seems incompatible with the meticulous attention
to the details of argument and definition for which he is famous:
the paradoxes of confirmation, the critique of the logical positivist conception
of empirical meaningfulness, the analysis of explanation. But
the lightness was lack of nostalgia for bits of doctrinal baggage with
their familiar stickers. He had no interest in ownership of such
pieces—he really did just want to know the truth—and when a decade
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carl gustav hempel
or two of close thought and argument persuaded him that some piece
was empty, he would push it overboard.
A friend (Wolfgang Spohn) described him a few years before his
death: “A delicate little old man with an extra large, almost square
head covered with vigorous snow white hair, eyes blinking behind
thick glasses, with the widest mouth I have ever seen—and when he
began to speak with that cocky Berlin sound that unmistakably colored
even his English, his entire furrowed face was set in motion. And the
sun rose, a human warmth radiated from him together with an intellectual
fire of strange intensity.”
Elected 1966
Richard Jeffrey
Paul Benacerraf
Department of Philosophy
Princeton University
[These remarks were adapted by Paul Benacerraf and Donald Davidson from a memoir by
Richard Jeffrey.]