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[5. Biographical Notes.]
Herber Feigl.
The philosopher of science Herbert Feigl
(Reichenberg, Austria, now in Czech Republic, 1902
- Minneapolis, Minn., 1988) studied physics and
chemistry at the University of Munich and in 1922
moved to Vienna, where he was an early member of
the Vienna Circle. At Vienna, he studied
mathematics, philosophy, physics, and psychology,
and received his degree in philosophy in 1927. In
1929 he met K. R. Popper whose ideas he found
interesting, so he encouraged Popper to write a
book which became the Logik der Forschung.
In 1930 Feigl immigrated to the USA. His article
(written with A. E. Blumberg), "Logical positivism:
A New Movement in European Philosophy" in The
Journal of Philosophy, 28, 1931, was one of the
first reports on logical positivism published in
the USA, which promoted the spread of logical
positivism. Between 1931 and 1940 he taught at the
University of Iowa and from 1940 at the University
of Minnesota, where in 1953 he founded the
Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, the
oldest center for philosophy of science in the
World. Between 1966 and 1973 he was president of
the Institute of the Unity of Science. Feigl
supported a materialistic theory of mind - the
Identity
Theory of mind - according to which mental
events are identical with states in the brain ("The
Mind-Body Problem in the Development of Logical
Positivism" in Revue International de la
Philosophie, 4, 1950; "The Mental and the
Physical" in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy
of Science, II, 1958).
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