Paul Oppenheim (June 17, 1885 – June 22, 1977)

  • June 17 1885 - Birth

    June 17 1885 - Birth
    Paul Oppenheim was born into an affluent and cultured Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main on 17 June 1885. His father Moritz Nathan Oppenheim, the son of a business man who had made a substantial fortune as a wholesale dealer in precious stones continued the family firm and became a major benefactor of the University of Frankfurt, endowing a chair in physics and funding the construction of an observatory.
    https://books.google.com/books?id=zbK3DklrwEkC&pg=PA149#v=onepage&q=oppenheim&f=false
  • Emigrated to Brussels

  • Emigrated to the US

  • Kurt Grelling and Paul Oppenheim, "Concerning the Structure of Wholes", Philosophy of Science 6 (1939), 487–488.

    Publishes brief communications on Theory of Gestalt. In which he describes "A good good example of a complex is to be found in a sequence of musical tones, each of the with a definite duration and intensity.
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/184502?read-now=1&oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6IndpbHNvbi5hbmRyZXcuNDIwOTJAZ21haWwuY29tIiwiaW5zdGl0dXRpb25JZHMiOltdLCJwcm92aWRlciI6Imdvb2dsZSJ9&typeAccessWorkflow=login&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
  • Deductive Nomological Approaches - Formal view of scientifically answering questions asking, "Why...?"

    More work on causation and explanation has been done within the logical empiricist program. The deductive nomological model of explanation by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948)—also referred to as the DN model of explanation—seems to give us an exemplar of a conceptual analysis without metaphysics.
    Hempel, Carl G. and Paul Oppenheim, 1948, “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, Philosophy of Science, 15(2): 135–175. doi:10.1086/286983
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-regularity/
  • Unity of science as a working hypothesis

    Oppenheim publishes "Foundations of the Unity of Science: Toward an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science," co-edited with Hilary Putnam. The unity of science theory focuses on stating that although there are many different branches of study, they all are unified under the term science. http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/philsci/openheim.putnam.unity.pdf
  • June 22 1977 - Death