Herbert G. Bohnert: The Last Carnapian

Herbert G. Bohnert (1918–84) was a student and lifelong friend of Carnap. He wrote a doctoral thesis on Ramsey sentences and, after wavering between academia and the computer industry, eventually taught at Michigan State University. Bohnert defended Carnapian positions throughout his career and was especially productive in the 1970s. Unfortunately, Carnap's philosophy was deemed hopelessly out of date during this period, and partly for this reason, Bohnert is almost completely forgotten today. This fate is undeserved. In this article, I reconstruct his career and philosophical development by drawing on publications, as well as diary entries and private correspondence. I then argue that Carnap scholarship would benefit from closer attention to Bohnert's writings. I support this claim by means of a case study from the philosophy of mathematics: Bohnert's account of a conversation about set theory with Carnap in 1968 sheds new light on the contested question of whether Carnap held mathematics to be analytic in natural language.