Reichenbach’s Concept of Logical Analysis of Science and his Lost Battle against Kant

Abstract

We defend the Friedman-Richardson thesis of a strong connection between Kant and the
logical empiricism. To remind the reader, logical empiricists claimed that modern
mathematical logic and mathematical physics resolutely abandoned the Kantian
synthetic a priori. In contrast, Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson argue that
Kant’s scientific legacy in the twentieth century philosophy was much more complex
and subtle. In fact, already Quine insisted that the logical empiricists still
followed Kant, above all, in preserving the sharp distinction between the underlying
spatiotemporal framework of physical theory, on the one hand, and the empirical laws
formulated within this framework, on the other hand. This, however, was only the tip
of the iceberg of latent Kantianism in the works of the logical empiricists. In this
paper we are going to demonstrate this point with the example of Hans
Reichenbach.