 Carnap was born on 18 May 1891 in the small town of Ronsdorf, now part of Wuppertal, an industrial city near the Ruhr area of northwestern Germany. His mother was a schoolteacher, and her father, Friedrich Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1824–93), had been a leading educator and educational thinker in the Herbartian tradition. Carnap was home-schooled by his mother until secondary school, and brought up religious, but the emphasis was on the ethical, rather than the doctrinal, dimensions of religious life. As a result, Carnap said, he had no crisis of conscience when he later abandoned any belief in God or the supernatural. In 1908 the family moved to Jena, into the house of another famous relative, Carnap’s maternal uncle Wilhelm Dörpfeld (son of Friedrich Wilhelm), a well-known and highly influential archaeologist. Apart from trips to Greece with his uncle, Carnap finished secondary school in Jena and enrolled in the university there, studying philosophy, physics, and mathematics, vaguely intending to become a high-school science teacher. 