Status Updates From Reise zu den Grenzen der Ve...

As the philosopher Robert Fogelin observed, skeptics about the extent of human knowledge come in two types, facetiously categorized as East Coast skeptics and West Coast skeptics according to their relative degree of laid-backness. “East Coast skeptics recognize that their knowledge is limited,” Fogelin said, “and this troubles them deeply. West Coast skeptics recognize the same thing but find it liberating.

After Germans entrance in 1938, So many Austrians rushed to take out memberships in the Nazi Party—the “March violets,” they were sarcastically called—that the authorities stopped accepting new applications. Godel’s wife dutifully sent in hers, along with the 2 Reichsmark fee, but was never enrolled. her father, Josef Porkert, had actually been a member since 1932, boasting the number 1,451,013.

A year 1923, Vienna: The German Students’ Union began drawing up blacklists of “undesirable” professors and handing out leaflets warning fellow students not to attend their lectures. “Race and Science” issued by the Union named 200 Jewish&liberal professors to be boycotted, among them Freud, the legal scholar and author of the Austrian Republic’s constitution Hans Kelsen, Karl Menger, and Moritz Schlick.