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Rudolf Carnap was born in 1891 in Ronsdorf near Barmen in Northwest Germany. He was the 14th and last child of Johann Sebulon Carnap (1826–1898). The father was a self-made man in the weaving business who became wealthy late in life, which after the death of his first two wives allowed him to marry (1887) into a well-educated family^l which included a prominent educator and archaeologist.² After his death, Anna née Dörpfeld, his third wife, a poet, teacher, and writer, tutored young Rudolf for three years. In Gymnasium his favorite subjects seem to have been Latin and mathematics.³ He studied at the universities of Jena and Freiburg from 1910 to 1914.⁴ He remembered that Bruno Bauch at Jena had taught him Kant's philosophy and Hermann Nohl had discussed Hegel's views, but it was Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) who impresed him most.⁵ He told Carnap about a new kind of formal logic which "could serve for the construction of the whole of mathematics". ⁶

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9690-9_8

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