GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages rated 4.60 by measly 5 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: More Circle than Schlick.
The book is a history of the Vienna Circle from its inception in 1907 to its development, evolution, and activities to its end in 1936. It began with Philip Frank, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Kurt Reidemeister, and Moritz Schlick with others attending ad hoc skull sessions. Their discussions at first were in Viennese coffee houses, but as the agenda got more systematic and others joined, they began to use a classroom after hours. Their discussions concerned the relationship of science to philosophy and vice verse. How does science know the world as distinct from philosophy? These philosophers set out to answer that question.
In time they found a prophet in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s gnomic jottings. The more unintelligible Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, the more they were dissected in the search for meaning. One acolyte made pilgrimages to Wittgenstein’s mountain retreat and recorded the master’s oracular remarks. When Wittgenstein did a volte-face, the Circle members did likewise.
Schlick became the de facto manager of the Circle as others participated, like Rudolph Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Kurt Gödel with visitors like Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. Rose Rand and Olga Hahn both attended its meetings and published. Neurath was the public face of the Circle and published a manifesto in 1929 announcing the birth of logical-empiricism. (By the way the picture language that guides travellers to rest rooms in train stations originated with Neurath, see his International Picture Language [1936].) Only statements that can be verified by observation (it is raining) or are logically coherent (a bachelor is an unmarried man) are permitted. For all else: silence. This was a conclusion they just could not stop talking about.
The Circle seeded analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world which started with a clean slate, ignoring with contempt the two thousand years of thinking that went before it. Plato, Kant, Hegel, and others were all thrown into the dustbin of history. A. J. Ayer was the English apostle who carried the reliquary to Great Britain for veneration.
These thinkers pondered:
- What sentences can be deduced from S?
- Under what conditions is S supposed to be true, and under what conditions false?
- How is S verified?
- What is the meaning of S?
While they were preoccupied with such matters, Nazism arose in Germania and Vienna became a battleground. In 1936 Schlick was shot dead on the steps going to a morning class in the mistaken belief he was Jewish by an aggrieved student who was then exonerated by the judicial system. Needless to say, the McKinsey managers at the University of Vienna welcomed the student back and expunged Schlick’s name from its records. Since the court had found Schlick somehow responsible for his own murder, his widow was denied his pension. And some might have thought the reference to McKinsey management was gratuitous.
It gets worse.
In the 1970s an Austrian newspaper published an historical account of this murder, and the perpetrator who had survived sued the newspaper for libel, and …. won. The Brown Years have been buried deep. Only in Austria! See my review of a history of Austria elsewhere on this blog.
There are some entertaining descriptions of Karl Popper’s thuggish behaviour that fits his texts.
I was motivated for graduate school by the taste of Plato in my undergraduate thesis. Yet when I arrived at grad school there was nothing but acidic analytic philosophy which ingested political theory and dissolved most of it. The readings were often derived from the Vienna Circle or its acolytes like Ayer, or the egregious Popper. Analytic philosophy is rigorous and that is good training, and it was the fashion of time, but it is also empty and sterile. Not something to say in a seminar paper. Salvation came in the form of teaching the history of political theory to undergraduates, noting the irony that these texts were not included in graduate program.
I commented on Exact Thinking in Demented Times (2017) a time ago.