Hans Reichenbach was a leading philosopher of science and a proponent of logical positivism. He made important contributions to the theory of probability and to the philosophical interpretation of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics.

Life

Reichenbach studied civil engineering, physics, mathematics, and philosophy at Berlin, Göttingen, and Munich in the 1910s. Among his teachers were neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, mathematician David Hilbert, and physicists Max Planck, Max Born, and Arnold Sommerfeld. Reichenbach received his degree in philosophy from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1915 with a dissertation on the theory of probability titled Der Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit für die mathematische Darstellung der Wirklichkeit (The Concept of Probability for the mathematical Representation of Reality), published in 1916. Between 1917 and 1920, while he was working as a physicist and engineer, Reichenbach attended Albert Einstein's lectures on the theory of relativity at Berlin...