CARNAP (Rudolf).
The Logical Syntax of Language.
The first English translation of one Carnap’s main works, which developed the distinction between object language and meta-language that was characteristic of Hilbert’s formalism. It also introduced Carnap’s distinction between language used in the material mode and in the formal mode. In the material mode, sentences which appear to be about things in the world are in fact syntactical, formal sentences about language. ‘One purpose of this book, in opposition to the view attributed to Wittgenstein, was to show that a language could significantly be used to express its own syntax. Another was to make good Carnap’s claim that philosophy, to the extent that it could be a cognitive discipline, had to consist in the logic of science, which was itself. identified with the logical syntax of a scientific language’ (A. J. Ayer).
From the library the British physicist Dennis W. Sciama (1926-1999), with his ownership inscription dated ‘1947’ in blue ink to the front free endpaper and with a Trinity College Cambridge Rouse Ball Mathematical Prize bookplate to the front pastedown, Sciama is best-known for his contributions to the fields of astrophysics and cosmology as well for having supervised Stephen Hawking’s doctorate thesis on Properties of Expanding Universes (1966).
