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The first photograph shows Carnap and his wife outside their house and is signed and, in another hand, dated 1959 as having been taken in Santa Monica. The second photograph is of Carnap and is dated 1960, signed and inscribed “Der lieben Erna, in alter Freundschaft”. This refers to Erna Lowenberg (1906-1993), a Viennese friend, who we presume to have annotated the photographs. An extensive correspondence from the Carnaps to Lowenburg is held at the National Library of Austria.

Carnap (1891-1970) was strongly influenced by the mathematician Gottlob Frege as well as by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1935 he emigrated to America to escape the Nazi regime and accepted a position at the University of Chicago. In 1954 Carnap transferred to the University of California in Los Angeles and lived there until his death. His various treatments of the verifiability, testability, or confirmability of empirical statements are testimonies to his belief that the problems of philosophy are reducible to the problems of language. Carnap’s principle of tolerance, or the conventionality of language forms, emphasized freedom and variety in language construction. He was particularly interested in the construction of formal, logical systems.