Author: Michael W Jackson

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.  

‘Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science’ (2017) by Karl Sigmund.

GoodReads meta-data is 502 pages, rated 3.70 by 140 litizens. 

Genre: history.

Verdict: Alstublieft! 

‘God made the world; we made the Netherlands,’ say the Dutch, referring to the 60% of the Netherlands’ current landmass which has been reclaimed from the North Sea via land fill, drainage, polders, dikes, levees, canals, sluices, weirs, damns, culverts, and windmills.  All the mud, water, mire, swamp, morass, bog, and more, combined with the lack natural resources, meant that the Netherlands was largely left alone by the larger nation states surrounding it (France, Germany, and England), though it offered a soggy passage among them.  

At one time the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium, Brabant, Dunkirk, Flanders, the Netherlands, Limburg, and Luxembourg) loomed large, but the Hapsburgs had other more pressing problems, as their gene pool swung from Austria to Spain.  When they withdrew the Low Lands were left to their own devices as a buffer between the greater powers.  It is a complicated story.  For a time the Netherlands included Belgium, but the latter broke away in an argument about taxation between Antwerp and Amsterdam. The provinces of the Netherlands squabbled among themselves about taxation, even when William  III of Orange was King of England.  He gets short shrift in these pages.  

By the way, Holland is one of the nine provinces, and to refer to the whole country as Holland is like calling Australia by the name of one of the states, e.g., Victoria.  

Rotterdam and Amsterdam used the experience of the Hanseatic League to go into global trade, and the Dutch Golden Age was born.  Literally golden because of the lucrative profits made shipping goods for others far and wide.  As commercial ventures this trade was unarmed, and the Dutch specialised in building ships with vast storage and no room for weapons, unlike the East Indiamen ships used by the British East India Company (BEIC).  To convert the Dutch trading ships to warships, they had to be rebuilt and no one would pay for that.  Ergo once the BEIC challenged by gun Dutch traders, they lost. But for a while the Netherlands had a global reach from Taiwan, to Korea, to Macau, Ceylon, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname, Brazil, Aruba, St Maartens, and more.  

When the Golden Age flourished so did Dutch art and that became an established part of the culture that remains today in all those galleries and art students.    

When Arthur Wellesley (Wellington) broke the French attacks at Waterloo a quarter of the troops in the thin red line were Netherlanders in orange who are largely omitted by English history. 

At the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars a republican, greater Netherlands was regarded as too unstable and too unwieldy to survive. Instead it was divided into two, creating the Kingdom of Belgium and the Kingdom of Netherlands.  The House of Orange had dominated several of the nine Dutch provinces, after generations of asserting its primacy more generally, and it became the royal choice. The House of Orange was resisted by the burgers of Amsterdam because of its engrained animosity to Catholics and propensity to tax, both being bad for business. But their attitude was not decisive. 

Is this orange a connection to Northern Ireland protestants?  Yes,  it traces back to the William of William and Mary.    

That town hall in Amsterdam on the Dam had been built as a republican town hall, but during the Napoleonic ascendancy it was converted to a royal palace for Napoleon’s brother, Louis, who became King of the Netherlands.  By the way, Napoleon installed him to extract taxes, but once in place, this brother sided with the Dutch, and Napoleon then removed him after but four years. This was the first instance of a Dutch king. Après la guerre the town hall became the royal palace of the House of Orange, but because of the long hostility of Amsterdammers to the House of Orange, the monarch took up residence in Den Haag as neutral ground, making it the seat of government, though Amsterdam is still referred to as the capital. Confusing, no? Confusing, yes!   

Declaration of interest.  I spent a semester at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies years ago, and have returned to the country many times since. 

This book does not even mention, still less resolve, one of the mysteries of the Netherlands I encountered.  Walking from the Institute to my apartment in the evening, I went along quiet, darkened residential streets, where, invariably, in each house I passed the front curtains were open at all hours of the day and night.  Indeed it seemed the curtains were never drawn, and I saw many a Dutch family in the front room watching television or eating dinner as I went by.  Whence came this practice of public display of private life?   

Another enduring memory of the Netherlands came from the lunches in the common room, where the Dutch invariably ate sandwiches with a knife-and-fork. Yep.  Even a ham and cheese was cut and sliced.