Sigrist, Albert. [pseud.- Alexander Schwab ]
Verlag der Bücherkreis, Berlin.
1930.
Softcover.
Original half cloth, 8vo, 216 pp. including 4 pages of publisher's adverts at rear. Black/white illustrations. German text. Book design by Jan Tschichold. Covers discoloured. With architects like Hugo Häring, Ludwig Hilbeseimer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Martin Mächler, this book of socialist building, housing shortage, new technology, new architecture, and urbanism from socialist perspective was published in 1930 under the pseudonym "Albert Sigrist". Sigrist was the pseudonym for Alexander Schwab (5 July 1887 - 12 November 1943), a German political activist who withdrew from active participation in politics after resigning from the fractious and short-lived Communist Workers' Party he founded ("Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands" / KAPD) in 1922, but continued his contribution as an independent left of centre commentator-journalist. During the twelve Nazi years he was arrested at least twice, spending the final years of his life, between 1936 and 1943, in a succession of jails. This copy has the contemporary, flourishing ink ownership inscription on the front free endpaper of Hans Reichenbach (September 26, 1891 April 9, 1953) a leading philosopher of science, educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. Reichenbach studied civil engineering at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart, and physics, mathematics and philosophy at various universities, including Berlin, Erlangen, Göttingen and Munich. Among his teachers were Ernst Cassirer, David Hilbert, Max Planck, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld. He became influential in the areas of science, education, and of logical empiricism. He founded the Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie (Society for Empirical Philosophy) in Berlin in 1928, also known as the Berlin Circle. Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises, David Hilbert and Kurt Grelling all became members of the Berlin Circle. He authored The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. In 1930, Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap became editors of the journal Erkenntnis (Knowledge). He also made lasting contributions to the study of empiricism based on a theory of probability; the logic and the philosophy of mathematics; space, time, and relativity theory; analysis of probabilistic reasoning; and quantum mechanics. Interesting association copy.