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The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle
From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history
On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle--an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick--and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason.
The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat.
The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.
On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle--an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick--and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason.
The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat.
The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.
313 pages, Hardcover
First published October 13, 2020
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January 5, 2022
The title of the book sounds like we are in for a mystery story, and that’s kind of indicative of how engaging a history of the Vienna Circle Edmonds has written. This could be really dry material, but Edmonds puts together a story, delving into events, characters, motivations, and context to make this very readable, maybe even for the interested non-specialist.
The Vienna Circle was an unusually collaborative small community of philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, and others, active primarily in the 1930s, centered in Vienna but with connections throughout Europe, the UK, and the United States. Its members included some of the brightest lights of the time — Rudolph Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Karl Menger, Kurt Gödel, the murdered professor Moritz Schlick, . . . And the Circle was surrounded by a penumbra of truly historical figures — Albert Einstein, for one. And there was Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whom the Circle had a mostly unrequited philosophical love affair.
Their “movement,” and it really was an attempt at a movement-like takeover of philosophical thinking, at least about the sciences and mathematics, was founded on a radically empiricist claim about knowledge. All knowledge was to be grounded in direct perceptual experiences of the world, their articulation in language (a controversial subject within the Circle), and their logical relationships.
While empiricism per se was nothing new — the Vienna Circle traced its roots at least as far back as Hume in the eighteenth century — what was new was the coming of age of formal logic during the time leading up to the Circle. Logic theory and systems of formal notation exploded at least from the time of Frege forward through Bertrand Russell and the Circle itself, with applications to the foundations of mathematics and the foundations of scientific knowledge.
Formal logic was essentially a new toy, and the Circle applied it everywhere. The marriage of formal logic and empiricism came to be known as the more or less official position of the Vienna Circle, “logical positivism.”
Ignoring internal differences, at least for the moment, our knowledge of the external world was a logical and linguistic construction beginning with what were called “protocol” statements. What exactly protocol statements state is one of the difficulties members of the Circle debated, but the gist is that they were statements of perceptual experience — sense perceptions articulated in language.
Any purported knowledge not resolvable into such protocol statements and their logical relationships was not knowledge at all. In fact, in what really seems an enthusiastic over-reach, any attempts to even speak of anything not resolvable into those components were regarded as futile, resulting in nonsense.
“Verificationism” arose as a theoretical statement of the Circle’s position, as a test of the meaningfulness of a statement. If the statement could not, in principle, be verified by perceptual experience (or pure logical analysis), then it was nonsense.
Thus one thing that united the Vienna Circle as a philosophical movement was its rejection of metaphysics as a useless and futile gesture. Metaphysics, for the Circle, was an attempt to do the undoable, to speak about reality independently of our experience of it. The very language of metaphysics — the “thing-in-itself”, “ultimate reality”, “realism”, “idealism” — fails to be truly meaningful. What are meaningful are the statements of science.
It may be difficult for a reader now to understand the motivation of the Circle’s members’ vehemence toward metaphysics, but we have to remember how strong the metaphysical legacy of German-oriented philosophy was at the turn of the twentieth century, with a century of Kantian and Hegelian influence in its wake. And of course Heidegger was a contemporary of the Circle.
Much of the lasting influence of the Vienna Circle centers on topics and approaches in the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science, and also in the way that many scientists understand what they are doing. In fact, I think it’s much easier now to find remnants of logical positivism among practicing scientists than among philosophers of science. We can especially find its influence in current debates among scientists about what counts as “good science,” e.g., in discussions of the testability of multiverse theories, string theory, etc.
The decline of the Vienna Circle was just as much a matter of politics and history as of philosophical decline per se. Certainly it met philosophical resistance, and its over-reach became apparent. If you observe and think for a few moments about the bulk of what happens when people speak, you find little of what logical positivism would regard as meaningful. We ask questions, make promises, make jokes, express emotions — all the everyday stuff of language. There’s actually relatively little of what the logical positivists could test out as truly meaningful.
Arguably, the logical positivists wrongly conceived what we primarily do with language altogether. And, in fact, one strong strand of philosophical thought that developed partly in reaction to the over-reach was “ordinary language philosophy,” championed by John Austin and at least in some version by one of the Circle’s own north stars, Wittgenstein.
But the practical decline of the Circle was brought about by the rise of fascism in Europe, Austrian and then German Nazism. The majority of the Circle’s members were either Jewish, leftist, Jewish and leftist, or at least known to consort with Jews and/or leftists. Edmonds accounts for a kind of Vienna Circle diaspora, much of it to England and the United States, starting in the late 1930s. The Circle was literally broken.
The Circle’s practical demise is one of the strongest parts of Edmond’s story, and of course the murder of Professor Schlick is one event within it.
The Vienna Circle, as I’ve implied, didn’t disappear without a trace. Some of the work of the Circle’s members and associated figures are landmarks in philosophy, mathematics, and scientific thought:
Rudolph Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem
Alfred Tarski’s theory of truth
Otto Neurath’s Isotypes
Karl Popper’s falsifiability as the very defining feature of scientific theory
And there was more.
All in all, my own perspective on the Vienna Circle, now informed by Edmond’s work, is that it was a philosophical position that needed to be articulated and tested. It does have intuitive appeal — the same appeal that lies at the core of historical empiricist theories of knowledge. History tested it and found it not to be wholly right, but it continues to frame discussions in the fields it most affected.
The Vienna Circle was an unusually collaborative small community of philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, and others, active primarily in the 1930s, centered in Vienna but with connections throughout Europe, the UK, and the United States. Its members included some of the brightest lights of the time — Rudolph Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Karl Menger, Kurt Gödel, the murdered professor Moritz Schlick, . . . And the Circle was surrounded by a penumbra of truly historical figures — Albert Einstein, for one. And there was Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whom the Circle had a mostly unrequited philosophical love affair.
Their “movement,” and it really was an attempt at a movement-like takeover of philosophical thinking, at least about the sciences and mathematics, was founded on a radically empiricist claim about knowledge. All knowledge was to be grounded in direct perceptual experiences of the world, their articulation in language (a controversial subject within the Circle), and their logical relationships.
While empiricism per se was nothing new — the Vienna Circle traced its roots at least as far back as Hume in the eighteenth century — what was new was the coming of age of formal logic during the time leading up to the Circle. Logic theory and systems of formal notation exploded at least from the time of Frege forward through Bertrand Russell and the Circle itself, with applications to the foundations of mathematics and the foundations of scientific knowledge.
Formal logic was essentially a new toy, and the Circle applied it everywhere. The marriage of formal logic and empiricism came to be known as the more or less official position of the Vienna Circle, “logical positivism.”
Ignoring internal differences, at least for the moment, our knowledge of the external world was a logical and linguistic construction beginning with what were called “protocol” statements. What exactly protocol statements state is one of the difficulties members of the Circle debated, but the gist is that they were statements of perceptual experience — sense perceptions articulated in language.
Any purported knowledge not resolvable into such protocol statements and their logical relationships was not knowledge at all. In fact, in what really seems an enthusiastic over-reach, any attempts to even speak of anything not resolvable into those components were regarded as futile, resulting in nonsense.
“Verificationism” arose as a theoretical statement of the Circle’s position, as a test of the meaningfulness of a statement. If the statement could not, in principle, be verified by perceptual experience (or pure logical analysis), then it was nonsense.
Thus one thing that united the Vienna Circle as a philosophical movement was its rejection of metaphysics as a useless and futile gesture. Metaphysics, for the Circle, was an attempt to do the undoable, to speak about reality independently of our experience of it. The very language of metaphysics — the “thing-in-itself”, “ultimate reality”, “realism”, “idealism” — fails to be truly meaningful. What are meaningful are the statements of science.
It may be difficult for a reader now to understand the motivation of the Circle’s members’ vehemence toward metaphysics, but we have to remember how strong the metaphysical legacy of German-oriented philosophy was at the turn of the twentieth century, with a century of Kantian and Hegelian influence in its wake. And of course Heidegger was a contemporary of the Circle.
Much of the lasting influence of the Vienna Circle centers on topics and approaches in the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science, and also in the way that many scientists understand what they are doing. In fact, I think it’s much easier now to find remnants of logical positivism among practicing scientists than among philosophers of science. We can especially find its influence in current debates among scientists about what counts as “good science,” e.g., in discussions of the testability of multiverse theories, string theory, etc.
The decline of the Vienna Circle was just as much a matter of politics and history as of philosophical decline per se. Certainly it met philosophical resistance, and its over-reach became apparent. If you observe and think for a few moments about the bulk of what happens when people speak, you find little of what logical positivism would regard as meaningful. We ask questions, make promises, make jokes, express emotions — all the everyday stuff of language. There’s actually relatively little of what the logical positivists could test out as truly meaningful.
Arguably, the logical positivists wrongly conceived what we primarily do with language altogether. And, in fact, one strong strand of philosophical thought that developed partly in reaction to the over-reach was “ordinary language philosophy,” championed by John Austin and at least in some version by one of the Circle’s own north stars, Wittgenstein.
But the practical decline of the Circle was brought about by the rise of fascism in Europe, Austrian and then German Nazism. The majority of the Circle’s members were either Jewish, leftist, Jewish and leftist, or at least known to consort with Jews and/or leftists. Edmonds accounts for a kind of Vienna Circle diaspora, much of it to England and the United States, starting in the late 1930s. The Circle was literally broken.
The Circle’s practical demise is one of the strongest parts of Edmond’s story, and of course the murder of Professor Schlick is one event within it.
The Vienna Circle, as I’ve implied, didn’t disappear without a trace. Some of the work of the Circle’s members and associated figures are landmarks in philosophy, mathematics, and scientific thought:
Rudolph Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem
Alfred Tarski’s theory of truth
Otto Neurath’s Isotypes
Karl Popper’s falsifiability as the very defining feature of scientific theory
And there was more.
All in all, my own perspective on the Vienna Circle, now informed by Edmond’s work, is that it was a philosophical position that needed to be articulated and tested. It does have intuitive appeal — the same appeal that lies at the core of historical empiricist theories of knowledge. History tested it and found it not to be wholly right, but it continues to frame discussions in the fields it most affected.
February 3, 2022
Decent introduction to the Vienna Circle; especially from a political (Jewish/left/anti-national) and anecdotal perspective (dislikes and hates, who cheated on his wife and with whom, suicides, and so on).
March 28, 2023
Come for the intimation of true crime, but stay for an examination of the collective life and times of a group of academicians and philosophers who wanted to make the practice of philosophy an exercise in formal logic, and purge it of metaphysical claptrap, thus making philosophy a fit support for modern science. Unfortunately, there are people who like their metaphysical claptrap, most notably fascists and hard-line nationalists, and this had a great deal to do with the disbanding of the Vienna Circle, sometime before the unfortunate demise of Moritz Schlick. I really don't have anything insightful to add to what the other commentators have mentioned, but I liked this book a great deal, and would read something else by the author.
September 17, 2024
Philosophisch gesehen halte ich den Wiener Kreis für weit hinter dem Deutschen Idealismus zurückgeblieben und - mit Ausnahme Wittgenstein und Gödel - für überschätzt. Kaum zu überschätzen ist aber die unermüdliche, universitäre Arbeit, die in Wien eine fantastische Diskussionskultur etabliert und in die Welt getragen hat.
So gesehen ist dieses Buch ein wichtiges Dokument für philosophische Universitätsgeschichte. Die Kultur des Wiener Kreises ist bis heute wünschenswert in allen Bereichen der Philosophie. Inhaltlich schätzt der Autor die gegenwärtige, analytische Philosophie mE zu gut ein.
Der Mord an Professor Schlick spielt in dem Buch leider eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle. Insgesamt bleibt es dennoch ein hochinteressantes Buch, das ich sehr gerne gelesen habe.
So gesehen ist dieses Buch ein wichtiges Dokument für philosophische Universitätsgeschichte. Die Kultur des Wiener Kreises ist bis heute wünschenswert in allen Bereichen der Philosophie. Inhaltlich schätzt der Autor die gegenwärtige, analytische Philosophie mE zu gut ein.
Der Mord an Professor Schlick spielt in dem Buch leider eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle. Insgesamt bleibt es dennoch ein hochinteressantes Buch, das ich sehr gerne gelesen habe.
January 9, 2024
A very well told story and history of what might appear at first glance to be a very dry and boring subject: logical positivism or empiricism, one of the fountain heads of contemporary analytic philosophy. For those familiar with names like Ayer, Carnap, Popper, Gödel, Menger, Wittgenstein, Neurath, and Schlick, this makes for a really fascinating read about the personal histories of the Vienn Circle's members and associates and the intellectual climate of Vienna throughout the first half of the 20th century. Edmondson does a good job of making the important ideas in philosophy of these thinkers accessible to the reader, though those unfamiliar with philosophy may struggle.
August 19, 2022
A solid, consistently interesting introduction to the Vienna Circle. The details about the life and ideas of Circle member, the Austrian social democrat Otto Neurath, is of particular value.
January 14, 2024
David Edmonds was the (co-) author of a book called Wittgenstein’s Poker which was about an incident that happened between Wittgenstein and Popper. It was a nice and quite successful book but basically it was just an anecdote blown up to a full-length book. I liked it but was not really satisfied.
In this book Edmonds has a broader subject. He tells us the story of the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle consisted of a bunch of men (and a few women) who formed a kind of a discussion group around Professor Schlick. I think it is not too much to say that their main claim to fame is that they were early adopters of the thoughts of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Or what they took to be his thoughts. Actually, looking a bit closer, it is amazing how they managed to misrepresent Wittgenstein is the way they did. Wittgenstein had contact with the group but did not join their meetings and was certainly not a member. Popper, on the other hand, would have loved to have become a member but was not allowed to, presumably because of his boorish manners.
On the positive side one can say that the Vienna Circle was vital in establishing a world view that stressed the importance of science. They were highly sceptical of Metaphysics (especially Neurath who would see Metaphysics everywhere, also in Wittgenstein, and rightly so. The others seemed to prefer to be blind to Wittgenstein’s metaphysical tendencies.) One target was Kant whose examples (e.g on space and time) of synthetic truths a-priori they deemed to be not only not a-priori but not even true. Their philosophy is called logical empiricism or logical positivism. And they may be regarded as God fathers of the Analytic Philosophy of the 20th century. What they had to offer as an alternative to metaphysics is not really exciting, namely verificationism and the concept of protocol sentences. Verificationism was turned upside down by Popper who thought that falsification was what scientists were after. Later came Feyerabend and Kuhn and one might say that the Vienna Circle had some positive influence on the Philosophy of Science. To say something positive about protocol sentences is on the other hand next to impossible.
Edmonds does not delve very deeply into the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. But what he says is sound. There are no (obvious) mistakes. He concentrates on the lives of the members and, when in doubt, prefers to tell anecdotes rather than boring facts. Fine by me. There is (perhaps too much) information about figures like Wittgenstein and Popper and Ayers, no doubt because there is simply more information about them.
I did learn something vital though. I said before somewhere that last year at a Wittgenstein conference it was announced that Ramsey was in fact the translator of the Tractatus and not Ogden. This, apparently was know to the Circle. And Edmonds quotes from a Neurath letter where this is stated as a matter of fact. So this should have been a piece of knowledge available for decades!
You will find valuable information on the culture of cafe houses in Vienna on Antisemitism (including a disturbing remark by Quine) and about the problem of making a career in Philosophy with the sad stories of Rose Rand and Friedrich Waismann. (It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time to make it.)
How did he handle the Poker story? Beautifully. He points to his own great book and cites his mother as a source for this assessment. This is what I call a sense of humour.
In this book Edmonds has a broader subject. He tells us the story of the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle consisted of a bunch of men (and a few women) who formed a kind of a discussion group around Professor Schlick. I think it is not too much to say that their main claim to fame is that they were early adopters of the thoughts of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Or what they took to be his thoughts. Actually, looking a bit closer, it is amazing how they managed to misrepresent Wittgenstein is the way they did. Wittgenstein had contact with the group but did not join their meetings and was certainly not a member. Popper, on the other hand, would have loved to have become a member but was not allowed to, presumably because of his boorish manners.
On the positive side one can say that the Vienna Circle was vital in establishing a world view that stressed the importance of science. They were highly sceptical of Metaphysics (especially Neurath who would see Metaphysics everywhere, also in Wittgenstein, and rightly so. The others seemed to prefer to be blind to Wittgenstein’s metaphysical tendencies.) One target was Kant whose examples (e.g on space and time) of synthetic truths a-priori they deemed to be not only not a-priori but not even true. Their philosophy is called logical empiricism or logical positivism. And they may be regarded as God fathers of the Analytic Philosophy of the 20th century. What they had to offer as an alternative to metaphysics is not really exciting, namely verificationism and the concept of protocol sentences. Verificationism was turned upside down by Popper who thought that falsification was what scientists were after. Later came Feyerabend and Kuhn and one might say that the Vienna Circle had some positive influence on the Philosophy of Science. To say something positive about protocol sentences is on the other hand next to impossible.
Edmonds does not delve very deeply into the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. But what he says is sound. There are no (obvious) mistakes. He concentrates on the lives of the members and, when in doubt, prefers to tell anecdotes rather than boring facts. Fine by me. There is (perhaps too much) information about figures like Wittgenstein and Popper and Ayers, no doubt because there is simply more information about them.
I did learn something vital though. I said before somewhere that last year at a Wittgenstein conference it was announced that Ramsey was in fact the translator of the Tractatus and not Ogden. This, apparently was know to the Circle. And Edmonds quotes from a Neurath letter where this is stated as a matter of fact. So this should have been a piece of knowledge available for decades!
You will find valuable information on the culture of cafe houses in Vienna on Antisemitism (including a disturbing remark by Quine) and about the problem of making a career in Philosophy with the sad stories of Rose Rand and Friedrich Waismann. (It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time to make it.)
How did he handle the Poker story? Beautifully. He points to his own great book and cites his mother as a source for this assessment. This is what I call a sense of humour.
March 17, 2023
This book is mistitled. Only three or four pages are devoted to the murder of Schlick. We meet Nelböck briefly. Schlick is killed. Nelböck goes to prison for a short time. After all, it must be ok to kill a Jewish sympathizer.
The story begins with Mach and Boltzmann arguing about the existence of atoms. Neurath, Schlick, and Hahn begin to meet regularly.
Chapter 4 looks at Bertrand Russell and bald French kings.
Chapter 5 focusses on Wittgenstein and his importance to the Circle
Chapter 6 Austrian politics, and Neurath opens a museum. He goes to the Soviet Union. As I recall, he wrote propaganda for the Kremlin. No mention of that.
Chapter 7 Karl Menger’s math circle. Coffee shops of every kind.
Chapter 8 Modernism and Freud.
Chapter 9. The manifesto of the Vienna Circle is written. Schlick is not pleased.
Chapter 10 more Wittgenstein and AJ Ayer and WV O Quine.
Chapter 11 Frederick Waisman. Antisemitism.
Chapter 12. Looks at the politics of the circle. They were hated by both Austro, fascists and Nazis. Perhaps because they were against folkish ideology. They disparage romanticism. They were suspicious of tradition. They were critical of the glorification of genius and more or less were pro individualist. Oh, and they were dead set against metaphysics.
Chapter 13 deals with various disagreements within the Circle. A big discussion was about protocol statements. Neurath thought that statements could not be justified by contrasting them with stuff that was extra linguistic. He was a coherentist. I have a weapon that I will dive with my people, Schlick was more of a correspondence theorist. Edmonds also discusses debates about verificationism, probability, and the status of ethics.
Chapter 14 The unofficial opposition: Karl Popper.
Chapter 15 The murder of Moritz Schlick. It deals briefly with the background of Nelböck.
Chapter 16. The circle winds down. Quine, Ayer, and Susan Stebbings.
Chapter 17 various accounts of various escapes from Vienna.
Chapter 18 The tale of Miss Simpson, and her attempts to find jobs for the displaced academics.
Chapter 19 The Netherlands surrenders. Neurath must flee. But ends up in a detention camp, which is reminiscent of an episode of Foyle’s war. Kurt Gödel eventually gets around to leaving Vienna. He must take the long way round, traversing the globe back to Princeton, New Jersey.
Rose Rand was an irritating and irritable woman, and did nothing to help her cause in getting aid once she arrived in England. Interestingly, Wittgenstein wasn’t terribly impressed by her intellectual abilities, but he spent years trying to get her money.
Chapter 20 Tells the stories of the later lives of several of the Circle. There were a number of suicides by spouses.
Chapter 21 looks at the legacy of the Circle. Popper sort of wins but then Thomas Kuhn comes along. It looked like maybe everyone would agree that Popper was right about an open society, but Edmond notes that we are living in an age of strident nationalism, and fundamentalist religion. He makes no mention of the totalitarian left, which seems now to be a much greater threat. There is also Quine and his “Two dogmas of empiricism“.
In the end, the legacy is one more of spirit than actual details. There are no verificationists anymore, but the importance of analysis and logic to philosophy continues. In the end, the subtitle alone is a more accurate title.
The story begins with Mach and Boltzmann arguing about the existence of atoms. Neurath, Schlick, and Hahn begin to meet regularly.
Chapter 4 looks at Bertrand Russell and bald French kings.
Chapter 5 focusses on Wittgenstein and his importance to the Circle
Chapter 6 Austrian politics, and Neurath opens a museum. He goes to the Soviet Union. As I recall, he wrote propaganda for the Kremlin. No mention of that.
Chapter 7 Karl Menger’s math circle. Coffee shops of every kind.
Chapter 8 Modernism and Freud.
Chapter 9. The manifesto of the Vienna Circle is written. Schlick is not pleased.
Chapter 10 more Wittgenstein and AJ Ayer and WV O Quine.
Chapter 11 Frederick Waisman. Antisemitism.
Chapter 12. Looks at the politics of the circle. They were hated by both Austro, fascists and Nazis. Perhaps because they were against folkish ideology. They disparage romanticism. They were suspicious of tradition. They were critical of the glorification of genius and more or less were pro individualist. Oh, and they were dead set against metaphysics.
Chapter 13 deals with various disagreements within the Circle. A big discussion was about protocol statements. Neurath thought that statements could not be justified by contrasting them with stuff that was extra linguistic. He was a coherentist. I have a weapon that I will dive with my people, Schlick was more of a correspondence theorist. Edmonds also discusses debates about verificationism, probability, and the status of ethics.
Chapter 14 The unofficial opposition: Karl Popper.
Chapter 15 The murder of Moritz Schlick. It deals briefly with the background of Nelböck.
Chapter 16. The circle winds down. Quine, Ayer, and Susan Stebbings.
Chapter 17 various accounts of various escapes from Vienna.
Chapter 18 The tale of Miss Simpson, and her attempts to find jobs for the displaced academics.
Chapter 19 The Netherlands surrenders. Neurath must flee. But ends up in a detention camp, which is reminiscent of an episode of Foyle’s war. Kurt Gödel eventually gets around to leaving Vienna. He must take the long way round, traversing the globe back to Princeton, New Jersey.
Rose Rand was an irritating and irritable woman, and did nothing to help her cause in getting aid once she arrived in England. Interestingly, Wittgenstein wasn’t terribly impressed by her intellectual abilities, but he spent years trying to get her money.
Chapter 20 Tells the stories of the later lives of several of the Circle. There were a number of suicides by spouses.
Chapter 21 looks at the legacy of the Circle. Popper sort of wins but then Thomas Kuhn comes along. It looked like maybe everyone would agree that Popper was right about an open society, but Edmond notes that we are living in an age of strident nationalism, and fundamentalist religion. He makes no mention of the totalitarian left, which seems now to be a much greater threat. There is also Quine and his “Two dogmas of empiricism“.
In the end, the legacy is one more of spirit than actual details. There are no verificationists anymore, but the importance of analysis and logic to philosophy continues. In the end, the subtitle alone is a more accurate title.
December 2, 2020
Excellent book. Not only it spoke of hard-boiled philosophical concepts in clear English, but also redeemed Vienna as an interesting milieu for further exploration. Vienna in the 20s and 30s seem like a hot potato in terms of things cultural: music, painting, architecture, literature and... God given philosophy!
January 2, 2024
An engaging account of the greatest philosophical group of the twentieth century. It’s more of a collective biography than an intellectual history.
Read
December 26, 2020One of the books that got me most excited about analytic philosophy as an undergrad was Janik and Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna, and intellectual history of end of the century Vienna and the crazily rich philosophical, scientific, and artistic context that Wittgenstein grew up in. This group biography captures the manic cultural and political excitement and upheaval in Vienna thirty years later that was the setting for the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. Another book on the same topic, Exact Thinking in Demented Times, published a couple of years ago, focused more on the philosophical influence of Mach and Boltzmann (the previous generation of philosophical/scientific thinkers) on the circle.
What I enjoyed most about this group biography was tracking the circle's various paths in exile and the efforts to keep them afloat in their new academic positions in the UK and USA, like the Academic Assistance Council, which apparently still exists in some form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council...
Neurath had the most dramatic escape, escaping Holland for Britain on a commandeered motorized lifeboat that threatened to sink on the channel crossing, and then spending time in a British internment camp.
After reading this I have even more sympathy for Waismann than I had before--I knew Wittgenstein treated him really badly, but he sounds like he had a miserable time teaching in the UK and his wife and son both committed suicide.
It will be a while before I return to teaching in person, but this anecdote about Gustav Bergmann makes me think I should adopt a more eccentric teaching style:
"In seminars he was known to lie down on a central table, with a cigar in his mouth, spin around, and blow smoke at the person whose turn it was to speak" (p. 244).
I think this will be my last book of 2020
What I enjoyed most about this group biography was tracking the circle's various paths in exile and the efforts to keep them afloat in their new academic positions in the UK and USA, like the Academic Assistance Council, which apparently still exists in some form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council...
Neurath had the most dramatic escape, escaping Holland for Britain on a commandeered motorized lifeboat that threatened to sink on the channel crossing, and then spending time in a British internment camp.
After reading this I have even more sympathy for Waismann than I had before--I knew Wittgenstein treated him really badly, but he sounds like he had a miserable time teaching in the UK and his wife and son both committed suicide.
It will be a while before I return to teaching in person, but this anecdote about Gustav Bergmann makes me think I should adopt a more eccentric teaching style:
"In seminars he was known to lie down on a central table, with a cigar in his mouth, spin around, and blow smoke at the person whose turn it was to speak" (p. 244).
I think this will be my last book of 2020
February 23, 2021
I have previously read "Wittgenstein's Poker," "Rousseau's Dog," and "Would You Kill the Fat Man," as well as suggesting to Edmonds that his next book should be about Koestler punching Camus. (Yes, that too happened!)
This is a tad ahead of "Wittgenstein's Poker" for his best book.
That's for several reasons.
One is that it has a solid overview of the Vienna Circle, including its "satellites" in Prague and Berlin, and its acolytes such as Ayer in Britain and Quine in the US.
Second is that Edmonds is a bit more puckish here than in some of this other writings.
Third is that he clearly makes Vienna a "character" in the book. (I've read one other book, about fin de siecle Vienna, with the rise of Freud, the exile of Lenin and Trotsky, etc., that did similar.)
Related is that Edmonds had relatives in 1930s Vienna. Fortunately, they all escaped.
Fourth is related to the first, in talking about the ties of Wittgenstein and Popper to the Circle. Popper comes off, overall, as losing a bit more luster. (He in later life claimed not to be a member of the Circle, but at and around the time of writing "The Open Society," when not so famous, claimed he WAS a member.)
That said, at five stars, I offer a complaint, and specifically, about the "dramatis personae" at the end, in an epilogue. The snarky entry for Tarski is rude. And it ignores that a lot of the ideas about self-reference and many related matters that many educated people attribute to Gödel actually come from Tarski, namely, ideas in Tarski's undefinability theorem. Gödel partially wrote about some of them, but only really within the world of mathematics. Tarski extended this to language and made the concepts much broader.
Ideally, this is 4.5 stars, within the concept of Edmonds' approach and related issues.
This is a tad ahead of "Wittgenstein's Poker" for his best book.
That's for several reasons.
One is that it has a solid overview of the Vienna Circle, including its "satellites" in Prague and Berlin, and its acolytes such as Ayer in Britain and Quine in the US.
Second is that Edmonds is a bit more puckish here than in some of this other writings.
Third is that he clearly makes Vienna a "character" in the book. (I've read one other book, about fin de siecle Vienna, with the rise of Freud, the exile of Lenin and Trotsky, etc., that did similar.)
Related is that Edmonds had relatives in 1930s Vienna. Fortunately, they all escaped.
Fourth is related to the first, in talking about the ties of Wittgenstein and Popper to the Circle. Popper comes off, overall, as losing a bit more luster. (He in later life claimed not to be a member of the Circle, but at and around the time of writing "The Open Society," when not so famous, claimed he WAS a member.)
That said, at five stars, I offer a complaint, and specifically, about the "dramatis personae" at the end, in an epilogue. The snarky entry for Tarski is rude. And it ignores that a lot of the ideas about self-reference and many related matters that many educated people attribute to Gödel actually come from Tarski, namely, ideas in Tarski's undefinability theorem. Gödel partially wrote about some of them, but only really within the world of mathematics. Tarski extended this to language and made the concepts much broader.
Ideally, this is 4.5 stars, within the concept of Edmonds' approach and related issues.
June 16, 2022
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in (any combination of) philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, linguistics, NS history (in particular in Austria), or the lives and main scientific contributions of the scientists of the Vienna Circle. The material is very well researched, lively presented and easily understandable, I think even with not much background in philosophy, linguistics, or science (though an interest in these areas is probably useful). For readers with background, on the other hand, the book is nevertheless very enriching, with many new (to me) anecdotes, connections and biographic details about the Vienna Circle. As for the historical parts, a candid, non-embellishing representation of Austria’s involvment in the NS regime and crimes is given, doing away with the (wrong) victim role of Austria.
I listened to the audiobook, but also just bought the printed book since it is an incredible source of information (the chronology given at the end is extremely useful), and I am sure I will turn to the book many times again, for information, or just re-reading certain parts. The speaker is wonderful—very refreshing, varied, and non-monotonous voice. My only tiny complaint is that the speaker pronounces the German names with English phonology (making it sometimes quite hard to recognize certain names) and has a strong accent when reading quotes in German. This may only bother German speakers, though, and I would still recommend both the audiobook and the printed book to them.
I listened to the audiobook, but also just bought the printed book since it is an incredible source of information (the chronology given at the end is extremely useful), and I am sure I will turn to the book many times again, for information, or just re-reading certain parts. The speaker is wonderful—very refreshing, varied, and non-monotonous voice. My only tiny complaint is that the speaker pronounces the German names with English phonology (making it sometimes quite hard to recognize certain names) and has a strong accent when reading quotes in German. This may only bother German speakers, though, and I would still recommend both the audiobook and the printed book to them.
February 2, 2022
I think the algorithm suggested this book to me because of my recent reading into the origins of the Second World War. I had no idea about who Professor Schlick was or what Vienna Circle stood for. The story soon brought me into familiar territory Pre-War Vienna, the rising menace of Nazi Germany, the lives of Bertrand Russell and Kurt Godel and the annexation of Austria.
It turned out to be, for me, a compelling read about ideas and situations that I had never come across before so I truly say it was educational.
It also brought home the difficulty that academics had into extricating jewish academics out of Europe when War seemed imminent. Even for such talented people deals had to be done, money raised and these were some of the most eminent thinkers and academics in their fields. Even those jews with enough money to leave were seeking employment as domestic helps as higher positions were limited in almost all friendly countries they could escape too. Palestine was under British rule and was effectively closed to them and Britain and America were also not prepared to accept a mass migration.
More interesting than I expected but the title sounded intriguing and nothing in the book felt like it was building up to a murder until it finally occurred though to understand the significance of the killing you needed to know the story of the group.
It turned out to be, for me, a compelling read about ideas and situations that I had never come across before so I truly say it was educational.
It also brought home the difficulty that academics had into extricating jewish academics out of Europe when War seemed imminent. Even for such talented people deals had to be done, money raised and these were some of the most eminent thinkers and academics in their fields. Even those jews with enough money to leave were seeking employment as domestic helps as higher positions were limited in almost all friendly countries they could escape too. Palestine was under British rule and was effectively closed to them and Britain and America were also not prepared to accept a mass migration.
More interesting than I expected but the title sounded intriguing and nothing in the book felt like it was building up to a murder until it finally occurred though to understand the significance of the killing you needed to know the story of the group.
December 31, 2020
A good biography should have the same impact as a well-written novel. One would assume that biographies would be more powerful because they are real, but often they are flat and little more than informative. The best biographies build character and tension, and fill you with the same sadness as losing a beloved character at the end of your favourite movie when the subject of the book finally passes away. "The Murder of Professor Schlick" balances the brooding drama of the rise of fascism and the internal struggles within a group of similar but different intellectuals, with the thrills of wartime action movies and film noir. There's comedy from the bluster of Wittgenstein and Popper, sadness as we see the likes of Godel and Zisel struggle with their health, and cameos by the world's leading thinkers. The chapter chronicling the final fates of each member covered a spectrum of joy at them finding their happy ending, or indignation and mourning at their mistreatment by the world around them. An accessible book for non-philosophers, and an entertaining read for those who know the thoughts but not the thinkers.
February 26, 2022
A cursory, but informative, overview of the Vienna Circle, their heroes, and the broader social milieu that served as a background for their philosophy of logical positivism. This may not be the best book, however, if you (like me) were seeking a detailed exposition of their philosophy as well as their debates with their philosophical contemporaries such as the pragmatists, emotivists, and critical theorists.
Perhaps an appropriate analogy would be to think of this book as a counterpart to the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell with a nerdier (more Austrian?) dramatis personae.
Perhaps an appropriate analogy would be to think of this book as a counterpart to the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell with a nerdier (more Austrian?) dramatis personae.
March 31, 2023
Eine gelungene Einleitung zu den Protagonist*innen des Wiener Kreises. Teilweise wurden für meinen Geschmack zu viele Namen genannt, die nicht hätten sein müssen - eine Beschränkung auf die wesentlichen Personen hätte gereicht. Dadurch ist es mir stellenweise zu verstrickt und dadurch anstrengend geworden. Außerdem fand ich es zu subjektiv an manchen Stellen. Ansonsten ist vor allem die erste Hälfte wirklich gelungen, danach flacht es meiner Meinung nach ab und zieht sich in die Länge. Dennoch eine gute Einführung wenn man sich mit dem Wiener Kreis beschäftigen möchte (die Ermordung Schlicks wird nur kurz thematisiert, der Titel ist irreführend was den Schwerpunkt des Inhalts anbelangt).
January 24, 2022
Very, very well written and researched. If I had a complaint it’s that I could have handled more philosophy.
May 15, 2022
Good popular history of a fascinating intellectual movement that can be seen as providing the European roots of modern analytic philosophy. The material is not fundamentally new, but this is an entertaining read that makes the reader wanting to use a time machine to have a coffee in one of Vienna's coffeehouses.
April 2, 2025
ok 3.5
this is like oppenheimer but for philosophers but einstein stays a prominent figure in both!
this is like oppenheimer but for philosophers but einstein stays a prominent figure in both!
July 7, 2025
mu weno
September 28, 2025
Edmonds always delivers a cracker
December 26, 2024
I felt I was on a journey with these thinkers and felt grief as they passed from life.
June 24, 2021
This is a fairly disappointing read, in that its subject is both inherently fascinating and surprisingly dramatic, yet the book often fails to grasp it. The Vienna Circle that emerged in the 1923 in Austria brought some of the most intelligent people on Earth together to debate the meaning of meaning. The Circle contained Kurt Godel, whose incompleteness theorem defined modern logic, Otto Neurath, a hyperkinetic socialist who started museums and created our modern international symbol system; Rudolf Carnap, who wrote some of the most important works of logical analysis, Karl Popper, whose ideas on "open societies" and "falsifiability" made him a later celebrity, and many others. Almost all were mathematicians and scientists, and none was a formal philosopher, but several made indelible contributions to the modern "analytic" school of philosophy.
The Vienna Circle had two shared passions. First was a love for Ludwig Wittgenstein, who demonstrated that most philosophical debates were really just debates about language; second, was a hatred for Martin Heideigger, whose metaphysical ramblings they found intolerable, and whose eventual conversion to Nazism fully justified the (largely Jewish and left-wing) Circle's distrust of him and his creed. Their greatest term of opprobrium was "metaphysical" and their goal was always to create clarity and define provability. What can be shown to be true? How can we know anything? They helped extend the verificationist view of science to all thought and all language, even if their opponents thought that view denuded the world of much of its value.
The Circle's problem was that its members were all debating on the edge of a cliff. Karl Popper (whose strident arguments actually left him technically outside of the circle) said that from July 1927, when three right-wing paramilitarists were acquitted of the murder of a Social Democrat, leading to riots and the killing of 89 protestors, he knew that their society was on bound to fall. Indeed, when the Austro-Fascist Dictator Engelbert Dollfuss used a railway strike to conduct a coup in 1933, the colleagues, many of whom were unpaid Privatdozents or even, like Popper, high school teachers, had to endure Anti-Semitic attacks and taunts from their students and colleagues. In 1936, a former student of the courtly Morris Schlick, the informal head of the Circle, murdered him. The murderer probably did it out of jealousy for a mutual love, but he pitched the act to the public and the court as a strike against "Jewish philosophy" (even though Schlick wasn't Jewish.) With such credentials, he was sentenced for a short period and was free again within two years. By the time of the Anschluss, Austria was already descending into barbarism.
So this should be an incredible and hair-raising tale. But the reader gets only a few pages explaining the thought of the whole group, and almost none explaining each individual's contributions to it. Thus the recounting of endless squabbles between its members (the Dramatis Personnae at the end has 34 main characters), seems pointless, since we don't know why we should care about most of them, or what they're doing besides upsetting each other. Occasionally the story is enlivened by tales of their escape from fascists, or by some personal escapade, but it doesn't seem to amount to much of a larger theme. No doubt the logical positivists (or logical empiricists, as they preferred to be called) would be fine with a tale with no larger meaning, but most readers will not be.
The Vienna Circle had two shared passions. First was a love for Ludwig Wittgenstein, who demonstrated that most philosophical debates were really just debates about language; second, was a hatred for Martin Heideigger, whose metaphysical ramblings they found intolerable, and whose eventual conversion to Nazism fully justified the (largely Jewish and left-wing) Circle's distrust of him and his creed. Their greatest term of opprobrium was "metaphysical" and their goal was always to create clarity and define provability. What can be shown to be true? How can we know anything? They helped extend the verificationist view of science to all thought and all language, even if their opponents thought that view denuded the world of much of its value.
The Circle's problem was that its members were all debating on the edge of a cliff. Karl Popper (whose strident arguments actually left him technically outside of the circle) said that from July 1927, when three right-wing paramilitarists were acquitted of the murder of a Social Democrat, leading to riots and the killing of 89 protestors, he knew that their society was on bound to fall. Indeed, when the Austro-Fascist Dictator Engelbert Dollfuss used a railway strike to conduct a coup in 1933, the colleagues, many of whom were unpaid Privatdozents or even, like Popper, high school teachers, had to endure Anti-Semitic attacks and taunts from their students and colleagues. In 1936, a former student of the courtly Morris Schlick, the informal head of the Circle, murdered him. The murderer probably did it out of jealousy for a mutual love, but he pitched the act to the public and the court as a strike against "Jewish philosophy" (even though Schlick wasn't Jewish.) With such credentials, he was sentenced for a short period and was free again within two years. By the time of the Anschluss, Austria was already descending into barbarism.
So this should be an incredible and hair-raising tale. But the reader gets only a few pages explaining the thought of the whole group, and almost none explaining each individual's contributions to it. Thus the recounting of endless squabbles between its members (the Dramatis Personnae at the end has 34 main characters), seems pointless, since we don't know why we should care about most of them, or what they're doing besides upsetting each other. Occasionally the story is enlivened by tales of their escape from fascists, or by some personal escapade, but it doesn't seem to amount to much of a larger theme. No doubt the logical positivists (or logical empiricists, as they preferred to be called) would be fine with a tale with no larger meaning, but most readers will not be.
January 10, 2023
Unfortunately, I need to begin with a bit of biography to establish that I am qualified to have an opinion on some of these matters. My first mentor in philosophy was a Heideggerian, the late Joseph P. Fell of Bucknell University. I wrote a published article for a festschrift in honor of Fell, published as Commonplace Commitments: Thinking through the Legacy of Joseph P. Fell. I have Master's degrees in Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science from Georgetown University and Cambridge University. Two of my five thousand word essays at Cambridge were on Wittgenstein and I got "firsts" on the papers. I tried to be proficient in both analytic and continental philosophy, but I must confess to being more in the continental camp by which I mean that I believe that philosophy cannot be divorced from the study of the history of philosophy. These are not glowing credentials, but enough to establish that I might have at least plausible opinions on matters philosophical.
An ex-friend who was kind enough to thank me in his c0-authored introduction to philosophy wrote that: "philosophy is nit-picking." I am not sure about the de-lousing metaphor, but this review will engage in some nitpicking AFTER I say that Edmonds is to be commended for an engaging and highly readable book that has much to offer to the professional philosopher as well as the general reader. Indeed, this is one of his great strengths---his ability to sketch complex philosophical ideas in a fashion that does not do them much harm. As someone who has taught philosophy in university I can attest to the fact that this is a very difficult thing to do without oversimplifying, in misleading ways, what is by nature complex. To be able to do this one must have a complete mastery of the material, and have a gift for conveying the ideas. I think this is the great strength of the book. Anyone interested in cultural history, 20th Century philosophy, Viennese life will love this book. My overall reaction, nitpicking aside is an enthusiastic thumbs up!
Neurath was, to me, the hero of the story. This pleased me as I almost never fail to use, like Quine, his "boat analogy," in anything I write.
I will enumerate the nits for my own sake.
(1) I hate it when editors dumb down a title and the content of the book. Another Pulitzer prize winning ex-friend had "civil war battle" added to the subtitle of his book on Fredricksburg. I suppose the bean counters think this sells books. Edmond's book IS SIMPLY a history of the Vienna Circle. Some idiot named it after the murder of a key figure to sensationalize the title and sell more books via the prurient interests of the mass man. I have to wonder how many people interested in tgis book would be shallow enough to succumb to this idiotic marketing? Inside the book the reader is assumed in many placed to be an idiot---the Sudetanland crisis is explained rather than simply referred to (people can google if they are so ill informed), and we are told that Stanford is a West Coast university. The title gave too much importance to Schlick when the book reveals a ensemble cast with figures like Carnap, Neurath, Popper, and Wittgenstein who play larger and more interesting roles than Schlick.
(2) There is a mildly enervating section on page 230-31 in which Edmonds sings the praises of the immigrant Viennese for assimilating whole heartedly to their new country. He contrasts this with contemporary immigrants, and then tries to soften the insult somewhat by explaining why they were so eager to assimilate. British white males for Oxford should not hold up willingness to assimilate asa virtue. Brits went around the globe seizing land and never assimilating ONE BIT to conquered nations. They did not extend citizenship universally to former colonists---only the rich from Hong Kong are welcome. immigrants from the West Indies were humiliated and abused and brought in as some kind of menial labor and still treated abominably (see the Windrush saga). My wife is West Indian and lived for 8 years as a girl in Clapham so I have some second hand knowledge about all of this. Probably the fact that they were white university types made assimilation possible in the first place. No one was worse at assimilation than the British.
(3) I can't put my finger on it but I suspect Edmonds may be a kind of moderate---not a radical leftist like myself, so this irks me. He seems to believe that fascism was not a Christian phenomenon. It certainly was in Spain, Croatia, Belgium. Mussolini reached an accord with the church, and in Germany the nazis were believers. He seems to be unaware of the fallacy that left wing does not mean Stalinist. Please tell me about the Danish and Swedish gulags on their path to socialism. It is like saying that all Christianity leads to the inquisition and the holocaust.
(4) He certainly has not done his homework in philosophy. This is typical of analytic philosophers who seem to think philosophy is trouble shooting problems by people at Oxford and Cambridge with some training in logic and mathematics, some scientific training and a bit of wit. Heidgegger the man may be indefensible, but he did not simply write rubbish. Popper did write rubbish on Scientific method. AJ Ayer admitted the truth of the matter---which Edmonds, to his credit, does use as the final chapters epigram, to the effect that most of what the Logical Positivist believed was false. It was so because they neglected the history of philosophy, and especially German Idealism. Edmonds needn't read Heidegger---see the Thomist Etienne Gilson's The Unity of Philosophical Experience or Wifrid Sellars and Robert Brandom on the role of idealism. The anti-metaphysics Vienna Circle had a boat load (pun intended) of unexamined metaphysical presuppositions which have been blown out of the water like HMS Hood. In many ways, Edmonds seems trapped within the narrow confines of analytic philosophy.
Still, overall, a great book that I am glad that I read. Some flesh was put on the bones of these figures many of whom I knew just by name. My son had just finished his Oxford degree in Ancient philosophy and was studying at the University of Vienna. The fact that I was going to visit him there prompted me to buy the book, and the book helped guide my purchases at an antiquarian book seller in Vienna---Erkenntnis articles assembled in book form, some in English, and some isotype pamphlets by Neurath!
An ex-friend who was kind enough to thank me in his c0-authored introduction to philosophy wrote that: "philosophy is nit-picking." I am not sure about the de-lousing metaphor, but this review will engage in some nitpicking AFTER I say that Edmonds is to be commended for an engaging and highly readable book that has much to offer to the professional philosopher as well as the general reader. Indeed, this is one of his great strengths---his ability to sketch complex philosophical ideas in a fashion that does not do them much harm. As someone who has taught philosophy in university I can attest to the fact that this is a very difficult thing to do without oversimplifying, in misleading ways, what is by nature complex. To be able to do this one must have a complete mastery of the material, and have a gift for conveying the ideas. I think this is the great strength of the book. Anyone interested in cultural history, 20th Century philosophy, Viennese life will love this book. My overall reaction, nitpicking aside is an enthusiastic thumbs up!
Neurath was, to me, the hero of the story. This pleased me as I almost never fail to use, like Quine, his "boat analogy," in anything I write.
I will enumerate the nits for my own sake.
(1) I hate it when editors dumb down a title and the content of the book. Another Pulitzer prize winning ex-friend had "civil war battle" added to the subtitle of his book on Fredricksburg. I suppose the bean counters think this sells books. Edmond's book IS SIMPLY a history of the Vienna Circle. Some idiot named it after the murder of a key figure to sensationalize the title and sell more books via the prurient interests of the mass man. I have to wonder how many people interested in tgis book would be shallow enough to succumb to this idiotic marketing? Inside the book the reader is assumed in many placed to be an idiot---the Sudetanland crisis is explained rather than simply referred to (people can google if they are so ill informed), and we are told that Stanford is a West Coast university. The title gave too much importance to Schlick when the book reveals a ensemble cast with figures like Carnap, Neurath, Popper, and Wittgenstein who play larger and more interesting roles than Schlick.
(2) There is a mildly enervating section on page 230-31 in which Edmonds sings the praises of the immigrant Viennese for assimilating whole heartedly to their new country. He contrasts this with contemporary immigrants, and then tries to soften the insult somewhat by explaining why they were so eager to assimilate. British white males for Oxford should not hold up willingness to assimilate asa virtue. Brits went around the globe seizing land and never assimilating ONE BIT to conquered nations. They did not extend citizenship universally to former colonists---only the rich from Hong Kong are welcome. immigrants from the West Indies were humiliated and abused and brought in as some kind of menial labor and still treated abominably (see the Windrush saga). My wife is West Indian and lived for 8 years as a girl in Clapham so I have some second hand knowledge about all of this. Probably the fact that they were white university types made assimilation possible in the first place. No one was worse at assimilation than the British.
(3) I can't put my finger on it but I suspect Edmonds may be a kind of moderate---not a radical leftist like myself, so this irks me. He seems to believe that fascism was not a Christian phenomenon. It certainly was in Spain, Croatia, Belgium. Mussolini reached an accord with the church, and in Germany the nazis were believers. He seems to be unaware of the fallacy that left wing does not mean Stalinist. Please tell me about the Danish and Swedish gulags on their path to socialism. It is like saying that all Christianity leads to the inquisition and the holocaust.
(4) He certainly has not done his homework in philosophy. This is typical of analytic philosophers who seem to think philosophy is trouble shooting problems by people at Oxford and Cambridge with some training in logic and mathematics, some scientific training and a bit of wit. Heidgegger the man may be indefensible, but he did not simply write rubbish. Popper did write rubbish on Scientific method. AJ Ayer admitted the truth of the matter---which Edmonds, to his credit, does use as the final chapters epigram, to the effect that most of what the Logical Positivist believed was false. It was so because they neglected the history of philosophy, and especially German Idealism. Edmonds needn't read Heidegger---see the Thomist Etienne Gilson's The Unity of Philosophical Experience or Wifrid Sellars and Robert Brandom on the role of idealism. The anti-metaphysics Vienna Circle had a boat load (pun intended) of unexamined metaphysical presuppositions which have been blown out of the water like HMS Hood. In many ways, Edmonds seems trapped within the narrow confines of analytic philosophy.
Still, overall, a great book that I am glad that I read. Some flesh was put on the bones of these figures many of whom I knew just by name. My son had just finished his Oxford degree in Ancient philosophy and was studying at the University of Vienna. The fact that I was going to visit him there prompted me to buy the book, and the book helped guide my purchases at an antiquarian book seller in Vienna---Erkenntnis articles assembled in book form, some in English, and some isotype pamphlets by Neurath!
November 20, 2020
Vienna Circle and its Jewish Connection
Author of 'Wittgenstein's Poker', David Edmonds casts new light on how the luminous figures of Vienna lived and thought through the dark times of the two World Wars.
*******
Nearly a hundred years after it was formed, the Vienna Circle, a school of thought that championed logical positivism, makes an interesting subject of study now, not so much for its key ideas, but for how it evolved during the interwar period and spread through the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond to India and China over the years.
The book under review sketches the growth of the Circle, its principal characters, and its central ideas relating to the project of banishing metaphysics and demarcating science from non-science.
But the major takeaway is that the book views the whole project against the political climate of the times, especially anti-Semitism, in Austria between 1910 and 1945 and how it affected the fate of the members and the Circle's activities. The group of intellectuals associated with the Vienna Circle is well-known more for their strong background in physics, mathematics and logic. The book sheds light on their moral and political views.
From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, the Jewish population in Austria had grown significantly. Jews were present in considerable numbers in the legal field, business, media and advertising. The areas they could not penetrate were politics and civil administration. In academics their numbers were restricted, but their presence was strong in hard sciences, evident among some of the Vienna Circle members: Hans Hahn (mathematics), Otto Neurath (political economy), Herbert Feigl (philosophy), Richard Edler von Mises (science and mathematics), Friedrich Waismann (mathematics), Philipp Frank (physics and mathematics), Carl Menger (mathematics), and Edgar Zisel (history).
The prominent non-members associated with the Circle -- Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein -- were of Jewish origin.
But the intriguing case was that of the professor in the title of the book, Moritz Schlick. On June 22, 1936, Schlick, the founding father of the Circle and a Gentile, fell to the bullets of his student, who suspected that the professor was having an affair with his girlfriend. The incident assumed a racial overtone with Schlick being misidentified as a Jew.
Murder most foul
Actually, the case is not that intriguing considering that the air in the continent, especially in Austria, had become putrid with the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism. The feeling that there was more to the motive behind the murder was widespread. One writer blamed Schlick for corrupting the national character of the accused. The accused in his self-defence justified in court the killing, alleging that the professor had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. The killer was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, but after Hitler annexed Austria, he was granted conditional release.
The Circle's philosophy had also antagonised the establishment. Its emphasis on experience and privileging of verification over authority, individual over race, group or people and skepticism towards metaphysics were seen as anti-traditional and against religion.
Besides, the positivist outlook went well with socialist thinking. Apart from Neurath, several Circle members such as Rudolph Carnap, Hans Hahn, Herbert Feigl and Philipp Frank had leftist leanings. Some of the members had close links with the Socialist Democratic Workers' Party. A few wrote for the party's journal, which championed the cause of science. The Circle was highly allergic to contemporary metaphysicians like Martin Heidegger, who was a member of the Nazi party and a well-known anti-Semite.
Vienna's descent
In the years to come, especially after the annexation of Austria, the position of Jews worsened. From being the cultural hub of Europe, Vienna descended into becoming the political capital of anti-Semitism. There was a time when the city hosted a number of intellectual gatherings like those of the Vienna Circle: the left wing and right wing groups; circles of philosopher Heinrich Gomperz; founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud; author of Austrian Constitution of 1920, Hans Kelsen, and the Geist Circle that included economist Friedrich Hayek. Fascism put an end to their activities and forced the sizeable Jewish population, including scientists, artists and left liberals, to leave town.
Karl Popper's case is striking. His family had lost its hard-earned wealth during World War I. Unable to withstand the harassment by non-Jewish citizens, including his colleagues and pupils, he was desperate to shift to the U.K. Waismann too moved, but his family could not, as his pay was low. His wife had to take up a child care job in a house to support her family. Thus began the dispersion of the Vienna Circle.
The Great Escape
In 1940, Otto Neurath, who had gone to Harvard for a conference, left for Netherlands against the advice of his well-wishers. At the Hague, he and his mistress Marie were stuck in a library when the Nazi forces raided Rotterdam and flattened it. Apprehending that the Nazis would enter the Hague soon, they rushed to the coast to take any means of transport to escape. They found a lifeboat teeming with refugees who were parting with all that they had to leave the coast. Neurath and Marie jumped onto the overloaded vessel and sailed the whole night with little hope of reaching the shores of Dover. But they did, only to be identified as 'enemy aliens'.
Logician and mathematician Kurt Godel, who was mistaken for a Jew and assaulted by Nazi supporters in Austria in 1940, too had a harrowing experience fleeing the country. He had to go through Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, and by the trans-Siberian railway to Manchuria and Japan. From there he took a boat to San Francisco and a train to Princeton via New York.
The impact of the World War II on the Jews living during the period in Austria can be gauged from the fact almost all of them perished in the holocaust. A third of the city's pre-war population was wiped out. Luckily, none of the Vienna Circle members was among them.
However, none wanted to return to the city after the war. Popper, who had lost sixteen of his relatives, said he would never go back. Austrian-born American philosopher Gustav Bergmann reportedly told a friend who was flying to Vienna to kiss the ground on landing and spit on it.
Paying in gold
Wittgenstein had been at Cambridge since 1929, but his relatives who wanted to stay in Vienna were not sure if they would be treated as Christians or Jews. Eventually, they paid an equivalent of 1.7 tonnes of gold to remain in Vienna.
After the war Austria regained its wealth, but not the glorious culture it was known for. The country did reclaim some of its distinguished citizens many years later. Popper was bestowed with the Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria and had a street named after him. A Kurt Godel Research Center and a Vienna Circle institute were set up. A lane was named after Otto Neurath.
The book also provides interesting anecdotes about Wittgenstein and Popper, some of which are already in the public domain.
S. Radha Krishnan
Author of 'Wittgenstein's Poker', David Edmonds casts new light on how the luminous figures of Vienna lived and thought through the dark times of the two World Wars.
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Nearly a hundred years after it was formed, the Vienna Circle, a school of thought that championed logical positivism, makes an interesting subject of study now, not so much for its key ideas, but for how it evolved during the interwar period and spread through the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond to India and China over the years.
The book under review sketches the growth of the Circle, its principal characters, and its central ideas relating to the project of banishing metaphysics and demarcating science from non-science.
But the major takeaway is that the book views the whole project against the political climate of the times, especially anti-Semitism, in Austria between 1910 and 1945 and how it affected the fate of the members and the Circle's activities. The group of intellectuals associated with the Vienna Circle is well-known more for their strong background in physics, mathematics and logic. The book sheds light on their moral and political views.
From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, the Jewish population in Austria had grown significantly. Jews were present in considerable numbers in the legal field, business, media and advertising. The areas they could not penetrate were politics and civil administration. In academics their numbers were restricted, but their presence was strong in hard sciences, evident among some of the Vienna Circle members: Hans Hahn (mathematics), Otto Neurath (political economy), Herbert Feigl (philosophy), Richard Edler von Mises (science and mathematics), Friedrich Waismann (mathematics), Philipp Frank (physics and mathematics), Carl Menger (mathematics), and Edgar Zisel (history).
The prominent non-members associated with the Circle -- Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein -- were of Jewish origin.
But the intriguing case was that of the professor in the title of the book, Moritz Schlick. On June 22, 1936, Schlick, the founding father of the Circle and a Gentile, fell to the bullets of his student, who suspected that the professor was having an affair with his girlfriend. The incident assumed a racial overtone with Schlick being misidentified as a Jew.
Murder most foul
Actually, the case is not that intriguing considering that the air in the continent, especially in Austria, had become putrid with the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism. The feeling that there was more to the motive behind the murder was widespread. One writer blamed Schlick for corrupting the national character of the accused. The accused in his self-defence justified in court the killing, alleging that the professor had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. The killer was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, but after Hitler annexed Austria, he was granted conditional release.
The Circle's philosophy had also antagonised the establishment. Its emphasis on experience and privileging of verification over authority, individual over race, group or people and skepticism towards metaphysics were seen as anti-traditional and against religion.
Besides, the positivist outlook went well with socialist thinking. Apart from Neurath, several Circle members such as Rudolph Carnap, Hans Hahn, Herbert Feigl and Philipp Frank had leftist leanings. Some of the members had close links with the Socialist Democratic Workers' Party. A few wrote for the party's journal, which championed the cause of science. The Circle was highly allergic to contemporary metaphysicians like Martin Heidegger, who was a member of the Nazi party and a well-known anti-Semite.
Vienna's descent
In the years to come, especially after the annexation of Austria, the position of Jews worsened. From being the cultural hub of Europe, Vienna descended into becoming the political capital of anti-Semitism. There was a time when the city hosted a number of intellectual gatherings like those of the Vienna Circle: the left wing and right wing groups; circles of philosopher Heinrich Gomperz; founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud; author of Austrian Constitution of 1920, Hans Kelsen, and the Geist Circle that included economist Friedrich Hayek. Fascism put an end to their activities and forced the sizeable Jewish population, including scientists, artists and left liberals, to leave town.
Karl Popper's case is striking. His family had lost its hard-earned wealth during World War I. Unable to withstand the harassment by non-Jewish citizens, including his colleagues and pupils, he was desperate to shift to the U.K. Waismann too moved, but his family could not, as his pay was low. His wife had to take up a child care job in a house to support her family. Thus began the dispersion of the Vienna Circle.
The Great Escape
In 1940, Otto Neurath, who had gone to Harvard for a conference, left for Netherlands against the advice of his well-wishers. At the Hague, he and his mistress Marie were stuck in a library when the Nazi forces raided Rotterdam and flattened it. Apprehending that the Nazis would enter the Hague soon, they rushed to the coast to take any means of transport to escape. They found a lifeboat teeming with refugees who were parting with all that they had to leave the coast. Neurath and Marie jumped onto the overloaded vessel and sailed the whole night with little hope of reaching the shores of Dover. But they did, only to be identified as 'enemy aliens'.
Logician and mathematician Kurt Godel, who was mistaken for a Jew and assaulted by Nazi supporters in Austria in 1940, too had a harrowing experience fleeing the country. He had to go through Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, and by the trans-Siberian railway to Manchuria and Japan. From there he took a boat to San Francisco and a train to Princeton via New York.
The impact of the World War II on the Jews living during the period in Austria can be gauged from the fact almost all of them perished in the holocaust. A third of the city's pre-war population was wiped out. Luckily, none of the Vienna Circle members was among them.
However, none wanted to return to the city after the war. Popper, who had lost sixteen of his relatives, said he would never go back. Austrian-born American philosopher Gustav Bergmann reportedly told a friend who was flying to Vienna to kiss the ground on landing and spit on it.
Paying in gold
Wittgenstein had been at Cambridge since 1929, but his relatives who wanted to stay in Vienna were not sure if they would be treated as Christians or Jews. Eventually, they paid an equivalent of 1.7 tonnes of gold to remain in Vienna.
After the war Austria regained its wealth, but not the glorious culture it was known for. The country did reclaim some of its distinguished citizens many years later. Popper was bestowed with the Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria and had a street named after him. A Kurt Godel Research Center and a Vienna Circle institute were set up. A lane was named after Otto Neurath.
The book also provides interesting anecdotes about Wittgenstein and Popper, some of which are already in the public domain.
S. Radha Krishnan
May 28, 2022
Ein überraschend lesbares Sachbuch über die Philosophie der 1920er-30er Jahre, mit großem Fokus auf die Biographien der beteiligten Philosoph*innen wie Wittgenstein, Gödel, Kuhn, Carnap und Co. Von den Abschnitten, die mir als Leserin engagiert versuchen, die philosophischen Überlegungen näher zu bringen, habe ich nicht alles verstanden, aber einen Grundgedanken bekommen. Besonders gefallen haben mir die Abschnitte über das Wien der Zeit, Kaffeehäuser und Ausprägungen des Antisemitismus und der Flucht und Exil der Wiener Intellektuellen in der NS-Zeit. Fazit: Keine ganz leichte Lektüre, ein Buch, das man mehrmals lesen muss, aber durchaus lohnenswert!
October 18, 2021
Great! Really interesting history of both the philosophers and the setting that initially housed and then expelled them (Vienna).
September 10, 2023
Đọc toàn bài tại: https://marginalia.substack.com/p/vienna-circle-1
Giáo sư Moritz Schlick là người đóng vai trò lớn trong việc tụ họp các triết gia, nhà toán học, logic học ở Vienna trước Thế chiến thứ hai, tạo thành Vienna Circle ("Wiener Kreis"). Nhóm ày đóng góp quan trọng cho trường phái logical empiricism (thực chứng logic). Thuật ngữ "logical empiricism" xuất hiện trong tiếng Anh vào năm 1931 qua bài báo của Blumberg và Feigl, với Feigl là một thành viên chủ chốt của nhóm. Từ "empiricism" (chủ nghĩa thực chứng) cho thấy Vienna Circle đã ảnh hưởng từ David Hume, triết gia Scotland thế kỷ 18, và Auguste Comte, triết gia Pháp thế kỷ 19, những người đầu tiên sử dụng thuật ngữ "chủ nghĩa thực chứng." Cũng không nên quên Ernst Mach, nhà vật lý Áo, đã đặt nền móng cho thuyết tương đối của Einstein.
Cuốn sách The Murder of Professor Schlick mô tả bối cảnh Vienna vào đầu thế kỷ 20, kể về cuộc sống của các nhà toán học và nhà logic học Đức và Áo, cùng với sự khác biệt trong tư tưởng của họ. Cuốn sách cũng đề cập đến việc di cư của các nhân vật này để tránh chế độ Áo Nazi và sự lan tỏa của tinh thần thực chứng logic đến giới triết học Anh-Mỹ. Vienna Circle thời kỳ phát triển này thường tụ tập tại các quán cà phê ở Vienna, nơi họ thảo luận về các vấn đề thời sự, triết học, toán học, và tôn giáo.
Những cuộc gặp gỡ tại các quán cà phê đã bắt đầu từ rất sớm, khoảng năm 1907, với sự tham gia của Hans Hahn, một nhà toán học và giáo sư cũ của Kurt Gödel. Sau đó, Otto Neurath, một người mới lấy bằng tiến sĩ ở Berlin, và Philipp Frank cũng tham gia. Sau khi Moritz Schlick gia nhập trường đại học Vienna vào năm 1922, nhóm mở rộng với sự tham gia của nhiều thành viên khác như Karl Menger, Herbert Feigl, Friedrich Waismann, Rudolf Carnap, và nhiều người khác.
Vienna có nhiều quán cà phê đa dạng ở trung tâm thành phố. Những quán này thường có bàn đá cẩm thạch, ghế nệm bọc da hoặc vải nhung, và trần treo đèn chùm. Bánh ngọt ở đây thường rất ngon. Một số quán kiểu cũ phục vụ cà phê cùng với một ly nước. Các quán còn có nhiều loại báo chí được xếp trên giá đỡ bằng tre. Môi trường này thu hút nhiều người trí thức, đặc biệt là người gốc Do Thái.
Tiêu đề của cuốn sách là "The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle." Cần phải giải thích một chút về nhan đề chính. Vụ ám sát giáo sư Schlick là sự kiện tai tiếng lúc bấy giờ. Moritz Schlick là một triết gia ngôn ngữ người Đức xuất thân từ Berlin. Ông làm luận án tiến sĩ về vật lý dưới sự hướng dẫn của Max Planck. Từ khi trở thành giáo sư tại trường đại học Vienna và nắm giữ vị trí của Ernst Mach, ông đóng vai trò quan trọng trong việc kết nối các nhân vật chính của Vienna Circle trong các cuộc họp thường kỳ của nhóm. Tài tổ chức và kết nối của Schlick đã giúp hình thành logical positivism và làm nó trở thành một trường phái đối lập với siêu hình học (metaphysics), vì Vienna Circle coi trên hết các tuyên bố siêu hình học và mỹ học đều vô nghĩa do không có cách nào chứng thực chúng, cũng như không cách nào kiểm nghiệm là chúng đúng hay sai.
Năm 1934, Vienna Circle bị giải thể do không khí chống Do Thái tại Áo, mặc dù hầu hết các thành viên chính của nhóm không có gốc Do Thái, chẳng hạn Schlick, Otto Neurath, và Rudolf Carnap. Năm 1936, Moritz Schlick bị Johann Nelböck, một học trò cũ của ông, sát hại. Vụ việc này trở nên nổi tiếng và gây chấn động, với nhiều lời tường thuật về nó. Schlick bị bắn khi đang bước vào trường đại học và đang trên đường đến phòng học, nơi đã tụ tập đông đảo sinh viên. Điều này làm nên tên gọi "Philosophers’ staircase" (cầu thang của triết gia) cho nơi Schlick bị sát hại.
Vienna Circle và Schlick là một phần quan trọng của lịch sử triết học và khoa học trong thế kỷ 20, đặc biệt là trong phát triển của thực chứng logic và thuyết tương đối của Einstein. Cuốn sách The Murder of Professor Schlick cung cấp một cái nhìn chi tiết về cuộc sống và tư tưởng của những người tham gia Vienna Circle và ảnh hưởng của họ đối với triết học và khoa học hiện đại.
December 19, 2020
Atmosféra předválečné Vídně je před čtenářem evokována velmi přesvědčivě. Mini profily členů Vídeňského kroužku jsou výborně napsané. O roli Tess Simmonsové, která v organizaci Academic Assistance Council (AAC) pomohla členům Vídeňského kroužku, když odcházeli z Vídně, která po anšlusu zešílela, jsem nevěděl. Není se čemu divit, že se členové Vídeňského kroužku do Rakouska už nikdy natrvalo nevrátili a i v dopisech, které si vyměňovali, místo němčiny používali angličtinu.
"One of Bergmann’s students recalled a conversation at the University of Iowa between Bergmann and a colleague who happened to mention he was flying to Vienna, “and Gustav said, ‘when you get there and get off the plane, kiss the ground for me, and then spit on it.’
Jak to bývá, mnohem později dříve nenáviděné Židy i ty, kdo se s nimi přátelili, Vídeň - nyní v konstrastu s kulturním významem v meziválečných letech už jen provinční hlavní město kdesi v Evropě- docenila.
"The city from which the Circle members fled has been reclaiming it. There’s a Kurt Gödel Research Center and most important, a Vienna Circle Institute, which was founded in 1991 to document and develop the Circle’s work. Popper’s bust is now in the courtyard of the University of Vienna. There’s a Karl Popper Strasse and a Dr. Otto Neurath Gasse. Tram D, on which Schlick commuted to the university, still follows the same route. The beginning and end of his journey on 22 June 1936 are marked by plaques: one on the outside of 68 Prinz Eugen Strasse, the other at the spot at which he was shot."
To nejdůležitejší ale naštěstí není pohřbeno v názvech ulic, pomnících a směšných bustách.
"On the whole, their message to their students remained steady: that science was good and metaphysics was bad. As Neurath put it to Feigl in 1938, “what we have in common will remain; as products of their time, the differences will fade.”18 Nothing fortified old bonds more than mention of Heidegger’s name. “One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was,” said Popper. His philosophy was “empty verbiage put together in statements which are absolutely empty.”19 On this even Carnap—not Popper’s biggest fan—concurred."
"Beyond this, there is the way the Circle shaped the practice of philosophy, particularly Anglo-American philosophy. It is easy to overstate the gap between analytic and continental philosophy, but by any reasonable understanding of analytic philosophy, the Circle is part of its DNA. Analytic philosophy has gone in various directions that the Circle would not approve. But the self-identifying merits of analytic philosophy are its meticulous attention to logic and language and the pursuit of clarity, the contempt for grandiosity, and the calling-out of nonsense. There is a suspicion of arguments that rely on “feel” or “intuition” over substance. The Circle was not unique in promoting these intellectual virtues, but they helped foster a climate in which they are now so much taken for granted that they are virtually invisible. In that sense, success of the Circle ideas lies in their apparent absence."
"One of Bergmann’s students recalled a conversation at the University of Iowa between Bergmann and a colleague who happened to mention he was flying to Vienna, “and Gustav said, ‘when you get there and get off the plane, kiss the ground for me, and then spit on it.’
Jak to bývá, mnohem později dříve nenáviděné Židy i ty, kdo se s nimi přátelili, Vídeň - nyní v konstrastu s kulturním významem v meziválečných letech už jen provinční hlavní město kdesi v Evropě- docenila.
"The city from which the Circle members fled has been reclaiming it. There’s a Kurt Gödel Research Center and most important, a Vienna Circle Institute, which was founded in 1991 to document and develop the Circle’s work. Popper’s bust is now in the courtyard of the University of Vienna. There’s a Karl Popper Strasse and a Dr. Otto Neurath Gasse. Tram D, on which Schlick commuted to the university, still follows the same route. The beginning and end of his journey on 22 June 1936 are marked by plaques: one on the outside of 68 Prinz Eugen Strasse, the other at the spot at which he was shot."
To nejdůležitejší ale naštěstí není pohřbeno v názvech ulic, pomnících a směšných bustách.
"On the whole, their message to their students remained steady: that science was good and metaphysics was bad. As Neurath put it to Feigl in 1938, “what we have in common will remain; as products of their time, the differences will fade.”18 Nothing fortified old bonds more than mention of Heidegger’s name. “One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was,” said Popper. His philosophy was “empty verbiage put together in statements which are absolutely empty.”19 On this even Carnap—not Popper’s biggest fan—concurred."
"Beyond this, there is the way the Circle shaped the practice of philosophy, particularly Anglo-American philosophy. It is easy to overstate the gap between analytic and continental philosophy, but by any reasonable understanding of analytic philosophy, the Circle is part of its DNA. Analytic philosophy has gone in various directions that the Circle would not approve. But the self-identifying merits of analytic philosophy are its meticulous attention to logic and language and the pursuit of clarity, the contempt for grandiosity, and the calling-out of nonsense. There is a suspicion of arguments that rely on “feel” or “intuition” over substance. The Circle was not unique in promoting these intellectual virtues, but they helped foster a climate in which they are now so much taken for granted that they are virtually invisible. In that sense, success of the Circle ideas lies in their apparent absence."
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