Prof. Meike G. Werner, PhD

June 9 until August 9, 2025

Affiliation: Vanderbilt University

Centennial Chair of German Studies | Professor of German and European Studies
Director, Max Kade Center for European and German Studies

Research for a study about:

Der Junge Carnap | Young Carnap 

is a study of Rudolf Carnap's formative years before, during and after World War One, i.e. the decade before he became one of the foremost representatives of logical empiricism in the second half of the Weimar Republic. 
Based on heretofore untapped archival materials—including letters, diaries and unknown documents—this study traces the path of the avowed anti-metaphysical thinker from a liberal-pietist childhood (Chapter 1) via his studies and engagement in the German youth movement at the universities of Jena and Freiburg (Chapter 2) into the First World War (Chapter 3), politics (Chapter 4) and the revolutions of 1917-1923 (Chapter 5) until he decides in the early 1920s to pursue an academic career. The study explores the significance of anti-institutional forms of sociability (Simmel) and alternative thought collectives (Ludwik Fleck) as constituting places of new knowledge, and articulated as such by Carnap in the foreword to Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1926).