Rudolf Carnap is a curious figure in twentieth-century philosophy. His principal reputation is as a leading exponent of logical positivism (or logical empiricism), a school of thought that, according to lore, is notably rigid and technical as well as dismissive of other ways of doing philosophy. One of Carnap's most-read essays (Carnap, 1932d/ 1959) argues, for example, for the elimination or overcoming of metaphysics based on strict adherence to syntactic and verificationist strictures on meaningfulness. W. V. Quine's most famous essay - arguably, the single most famous essay in analytic philosophy - “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951/1980) singles out Carnap as its most important target and uses the notion of “dogma ” to characterize the key commitments of his version of empiricism. Quine’s essay begins with the bold claim that “modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas” – dogmas his readers would at the time closely associate with Carnap – and then argues that embracing an empiricism without these dogmas has two principal effects: