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The Fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science took place at Harvard University from September 3 to September 9, 1939 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It marked the end of the scientific community's great forum dedicated to promoting the Encyclopedia of Unified Science,with some two hundred participants and 60 speakers. In spite of the outbreak of World War II, Otto Neurath's International Institute for the Unity of Science (The Hague) had been able to organize the congress with the support of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,the American Philosophical Association, the Philosophy and Science Association, the History of Science Society and the Association for Symbolic Logic. The congress was opened by James B. Conant (president of Harvard University), P.W. Bridgman, Otto Neurath and Charles Morris. Due to the escalation of the war, the abstracts and contributions submitted at the beginning of the conference could not be published, as originally planned, in the ninth volume of Erkenntnis/Journal of Unified Science (1940). Only ten of these, already published separately, were included in the reprint of the journal Erkenntnis. The remaining preprints mostly languished in Otto Neurath's papers. We plan to print the most important of these so far unpublished contributions to the six sections of the Fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science (Aims and Methods for Unifying Science, Scientific Method and the Language of Science, Methodology of the Special Sciences, Problems in Exact Logic, Science and Society, History of Science) in the coming Yearbooks.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2454-8_22

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