Hans Reichenbach: biography of this German physicist and philosopher.

A summary of the life and career of Hans Reichenbach, representative of logical empiricism.

Within the different philosophical movements that emerged in Europe during the 20th century, Reichenbach is one of the outstanding authors.

Below we will be able to learn more about all the episodes of the life of this philosopher and thus better understand what were the great contributions he was able to make in this discipline thanks to the extensive training he received and that allowed him to combine different knowledge. Here you will find a biography of Hans Reichenbach in abridged format.

Short biography of Hans Reichenbach

Hans Reichenbach was born in the year 1891 in the city of Hamburg, at that time belonging to the German Empire.. His family was of Jewish descent, although they had converted to Protestant Christianity. His upbringing took place in his hometown. After completing his primary and secondary education, he decided to begin his higher studies.

His university life was intense. On the one hand, he studied engineering at the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences, but he also decided to continue his studies, this time at the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart. decided to continue his studies, this time in the fields of mathematics and physics on the one hand and philosophy on the other.. To this end, he successively enrolled at different German universities, such as Berlin, Munich, Göttingen and Erlangen.

All this academic experience of Hans Reichenbach was also nourished by the experience of having had some professors who were true eminences in their respective fields. Examples include Ernst Alfred Cassirer in philosophy, Max Bon and David Hilbert in mathematics, or Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld and Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck himself, who went on to win the Nobel Prize.

But university life was not only useful for his education, as he was also a very active member of different student movements. He joined the Freistudentenschaft, one of the most important groups. He was also present when the Freideutsche Jugend was created; he wrote several articles in this field, in which he spoke about the reform of the universities.

This activism brought him progressively closer to communist groups, and he was also influenced by his brother, who was a militant of the communist movement.who was a militant in the left-wing communist movement. Hans Reichenbach joined the Communist Workers' Party of Germany. He achieved a prominent position in it, so much so that he participated on behalf of the party in the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

He became increasingly involved in the political side of the student organizations, to the point of founding and chairing the Berlin Socialist Students' Party. The germ of this grouping already existed in a veiled form, because of the vetoes that existed to these movements, but it was with Hans Reichenbach when it definitely crystallized into a visible organization.

During this time he had the opportunity to meet some of the most important activists of the time in Germany, such as Alexander Schwab or Karl August Wittfogel, although both later abandoned their communist position, and even Wittfogel renounced this ideology after the events of World War II.

However, despite these intense years of involvement in political and protest activities, Hans Reichenbach completely abandoned this facet of his life around 1920. It was after attending a series of lectures by one of the most important scientists in the history of mankind, Albert Einstein, in which he learned about the theory of the he learned about the theory of relativity, which would revolutionize the world of physics..

Career development

After obtaining the degrees listed above, Hans Reichenbach received his doctorate, publishing a thesis in which he discussed the concept of probability to mathematically represent reality. In these years the First World War broke out, in which his country, Germany, was involved, so he was forced to serve in the army, although in 1917 he would return home, due to health issues.

In the 1920s, began his time as an academic, working for the Technische Hochschule at the University of Stuttgart.. In addition, he also published his work, "The theory of relativity and a priori knowledge", where he united two of his fields of knowledge, which were physics and philosophy. In this volume, he confronted some of Kant's approaches.

This was the beginning of a prolific period in which he published a whole succession of books of this type, such as Axiomatization of the Theory of Relativity, in 1924, From Copernicus to Einstein, in 1927, or The Philosophy of Space and Time, in 1928. Hans Reichenbach tried to propose approaches between positivist logic, philosophy and relativity theory of physics.

His good relationship with Planck, von Laue or Albert Einstein himself, made it easier for him to join the physics department of the University of Berlin, as an assistant professor. His way of teaching was a small revolution, as he broke away from the rigid academic schemes and promoted an atmosphere of debate that was not common at the time. atmosphere, which was not common at the time.

In 1928, Hans Reichenbach created the Berlin Circle created the Berlin Circle, an association with the philosophy of logical empiricism as its backdrop.. This group was joined by personalities of the stature of David Hilbert, Richard Edler von Mises, Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel or Kurt Grelling. He also launched a philosophy journal, in partnership with the author Rudolf Carnap. The publication received the name Erkenntnis, a term meaning knowledge.

Exile to Turkey and the United States

Arrived the year 1933, with the rise of Nazism to power in Germany, the reprisals against people of Jewish origin began, as was the case of Hans ReichenbachHe was a Protestant, even though his family had converted to Protestantism and he himself had married Selma Menzel under this faith.

Therefore, because of the new racial laws that were imposed in Germany, Reichenbach lost his position at the University of Berlin. He knew that this was only the beginning, so he decided to leave the country immediately. His first destination outside Germany was Turkey.

He was well received there and He soon resumed his teaching career, this time at the University of Istanbul, where he became head of the philosophy department.. During the next few years, he taught at this institution, while at the same time organizing seminars and courses on other disciplines in which he was also an expert. In 1935 he published another of his famous works, "The Theory of Probability".

Thanks to his contacts with authors such as Charles William Morris, he was able to agree to join the University of California, Los Angeles, as a professor of philosophy, and so in 1938 he moved to the United States to take a new step in his career. in 1938 he moved to the United States to take a new step in his career.. Thanks to the work of Hans Reichenbach, the philosophy department of this university became a reference in the USA.

Throughout this period, he trained students who would end up excelling in this field. Some of the most notable ones could be Wesley Charles Salmon, Hilary Whitehall Putnam and Carl Hempel, who had already dealt with Hans Reichenbach previously and belonged to the Berlin Circle. During these years, he also continued to publish works, including some of the most important volumes he created.

Among them are, for example, "Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics", 1944, "Elements of Symbolic Logic", 1947 and probably his most influential book, "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy", which he published in 1951.

Final years and death

Hans Reichenbach was at the peak of his career. He was teaching at a prestigious university, was a reference in his field and had just published some of his best works. Some of his most recent works dealt with exciting topics such as the philosophy of time and other questions about the scientific laws of nature..

In his research on time, he studied the concept of time in language and established three different typologies, namely speech time, event time and reference time. This differentiation was later taken up by language experts to make the distinction between different verb tenses.

In fact, this work crystallized in his last two works, which were "The direction of time" and "Nomological statements and admissible operations". Unfortunately, both were published posthumously, since Hans Reichenbach died suddenly of a Heart attack. It was 1953 and he was 61 years old when this tragic event happened.

In any case, his career was already successful enough to leave a legacy that reaches our days.