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Early Life and Education
Known as "Peter" to his friends, Carl Gustav Hempel was born on January 8th, 1905 in a small village near Berlin, Germany. As he progressed in age, he took an interest in philosophy, physics, and mathematics. He studied at the Universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg before coming to the University of Berlin in 1925. -
The "Vienna Circle"
In 1929, Hempel spent the fall semester at the University of Vienna, where he studied with esteemed members of the German Philosophical Circle who were advocates of logical positivism and members of (what came to be known as) “the Vienna Circle”. It would fall to Hempel to become perhaps the most astute critic of that movement and to contribute to its refinement as logical empiricism. Soon after earning his doctorate, he relocated to Belgium under mounting pressure from Hitler's Nazi regime. -
Relocation to America
Although not Jewish, Carl's wife was of Jewish Ancestry and eventually vacated Europe and moved to America where he taught at the Universities of Chicago, New York, and Princeton where he taught alongside Thomas Kuhn until he was made emeritus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before finally settling at the University of Pittsburgh where he remained until his retirement in 1985.
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The "Ravens Paradox"
The Ravens Paradox is a paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for a statement. Observing objects that are neither black nor ravens may formally increase the likelihood that all ravens are black even though, intuitively, these observations are unrelated. This problem was proposed to illustrate a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kjei6doobQ