Reichenbach, Hans
Born Sept. 26, 1891, Hamburg, Germany. Successively Privatdozent at the College of Engineering at Stuttgart, Professor of philosophy in the universities of Berlin, Istanbul (1933-1938), University of California at Los Angeles (since 1938); the leading figure of the Berlin group in the development of recent logical empiricism. See Scientific Empiricism.
Reichenbach’s work has been devoted mainly to the philosophy of empirical science; for a brief general survey of the problems which have particularly attracted his attention, and of his conception of an adequate method for their solution, cf. his Raum. Zeit Lehre. His contributions center around (I) the problems of space and time, and (II) those of causality, induction and probability. His studies of the first group of problems include thorough analyses of the nature of geometry and of the logical structure of relativistic physics, these researches led Reichenbach to a rejection of the aprioristic theory of space and time. Reichenbach’s contributions to the second group of problems pivot around his general theory of probability which is based on a statistical definition of the probability concept. In terms of this probabilistic approach, Relchenbach has carried out comprehensive analyses of methodological and epistemological problems such as those of causality and induction. He has also extended his formal probability theory into a probability logic in which probabilities play the part of truth values. — C.G.H.
Other works Atom and Cosmos; Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre; Experience and Prediction.