The Basics: People, Activities and Overview of Doctrines 2.1 People

The Vienna Circle was a group of scientifically trained philosophers and philosophically interested scientists who met under the (nominal) leadership of Moritz Schlick for often weekly discussions of problems in the philosophy of science during academic terms in the years from 1924 to 1936. As is not uncommon with such groups, its identity is blurred along several edges. Not all of those who ever attended the discussions can be called members, and not all who attended did so over the entire period. Typically, attention is focused on long-term regulars who gained prominence through their philosophical publications, but even these do not in all cases fall into the period of the Vienna Circle proper. It is natural, nevertheless, to consider under the heading “Vienna Circle” also the later work of leading members who were still active in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Finally, there is the so-called periphery of international contacts and visitors that prefigured the post-World War II network of analytical philosophers of science. In the present article the emphasis will be placed on the long-term regulars whose contributions will be followed, selectively, into the post-Schlick era.
According to its unofficial manifesto (see section 2.3 below), the Circle had “members” and recognized others as “sympathetic” to its aims. It included as members, besides Schlick who had been appointed to Mach’s old chair in Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences at the University of Vienna in 1922, the mathematician Hans Hahn, the physicist Philipp Frank, the social scientist Otto Neurath, his wife, the mathematician Olga Hahn-Neurath, the philosopher Viktor Kraft, the mathematicians Theodor Radacovic and Gustav Bergmann and, since 1926, the philosopher and logician Rudolf Carnap. (Even before World War I, there existed a similarly oriented discussion circle that included Frank, Hahn and Neurath. During the time of the Schlick Circle, Frank resided in Prague throughout, Carnap did so from 1931.) Further members were recruited among Schlick’s students, like Friedrich Waismann, Herbert Feigl and Marcel Natkin, others were recruited among Hahn’s students, like Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Though listed as members in the manifesto, Menger and Kraft later wanted to be known only as as sympathetic associates, like, all along, the mathematician Kurt Reidemeister and the philosopher and historian of science Edgar Zilsel. (Karl Popper was never a member or associate of the Circle, though he studied with Hahn in the 1920s and in the early 1930s discussed its doctrines with Feigl and Carnap.) Over the years, other participants (not listed in the manifesto) included other students of Schlick’s and Hahn’s like Bela von Juhos, Josef Schächter, Walter Hollitscher, Heinrich Neider, Rose Rand, Josef Rauscher and Käthe Steinhardt, a secondary teacher, Robert Neumann, and, as notable thinkers with independent connections, the jurist and philosopher Felix Kaufmann (also a member of F.A. von Hayek’s “Geistkreis”) and the innovative psychologist Egon Brunswik (coming, like the even more loosely associated sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Marie Jahoda, from the pioneering Karl Bühler’s University Institute of Psychology).
Despite its prominent position in the rich, if fragile, intellectual culture of inter-war Vienna and most likely due to its radical doctrines, the Vienna Circle found itself virtually isolated in most of German speaking philosophy. The one exception was its contact and cooperation with the Berlin Society for Empirical (later: Scientific) Philosophy (the other point of origin of logical empiricism). The members of the Berlin Society sported a broadly similar outlook and included, besides the philosopher Hans Reichenbach, the logicians Kurt Grelling and Walter Dubislav, the psychologist Kurt Lewin, the surgeon Friedrich Kraus and the mathematician Richard von Mises. (Its leading members Reichenbach, Grelling and Dubislav were listed in the Circle’s manifesto as sympathisers.) At the same time, members of the Vienna Circle also engaged directly, if selectively, with the Warsaw logicians (Tarski visited Vienna in 1930, Carnap later that year visited Warsaw and Tarski returned to Vienna in 1935). Probably partly because of its firebrand reputation, the Circle attracted also a series of visiting younger researchers and students including Carl Gustav Hempel from Berlin, Hasso Härlen from Stuttgart, Ludovico Geymonat from Italy, Jørgen Jørgensen, Eino Kaila, Arne Naess and Ake Petzall from Scandinavia, A.J. Ayer from the UK, Albert Blumberg, Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel and W.V.O. Quine from the USA, H.A. Lindemann from Argentina and Tscha Hung from China. (The reports and recollections of these former visitors—e.g. Nagel 1936—are of interest in complementing the Circle’s in-house histories and recollections which start with the unofficial manifesto—Carnap, Hahn and Neurath 1929—and extend through Neurath 1936, Frank 1941, 1949a and Feigl 1943 to the memoirs by Carnap 1963, Feigl 1969a, 1969b, Bergmann 1987, Menger 1994.)
The aforementioned social and political engagement of members of the Vienna Circle and of Vienna Circle philosophy for Enlightenment reason had never made the advancement of its associates or protegées easy in Viennese academia. From 1934 onwards, with anti-semitism institutionalized and irrationalism increasingly dominating public discourse, this engagement began to cost the Circle still more dearly. Not only was the Verein Ernst Mach closed down early that year for political reasons, but the ongoing dispersal of Circle members by emigration, forced exile and death meant that after the murder of Schlick in 1936 only a small rump was able to continue meetings for another two years in Vienna. (1931: Feigl emigrated to USA; 1934: Hahn died, Neurath fled to Holland, 1940 to UK; 1935: Carnap emigrated to USA; 1936: Schlick murdered; 1937: Menger emigrated to USA, Waismann to UK; 1938: Frank, Kaufmann, Brunswik, Bergmann emigrated to USA; Zilsel, Rand to UK, later to USA; Hollitscher fled to Switzerland, later to UK; Schächter emigrated to Palestine; 1940: Gödel emigrated to USA; see Dahms 1995 for a chronology of the exodus.) But the end of the Vienna Circle as such did not mean the end of its influence due to the continuing development of the philosophy of former members (and the work of Kraft in post-World War II Vienna; on this see Stadler 2008). Particularly through their work in American exile (esp. Carnap at Harvard, Chicago and UCLA; Feigl at Iowa and Minnesota; less so Frank at Harvard) and that of earlier American visitors (esp. Quine, Nagel), as well as through the work of fellow emigrées from the Berlin Society (esp. Reichenbach, Hempel) and their students (Hilary Putnam, Wesley Salmon), logical empiricism strongly influenced the post-World War II development of analytic philosophy of science. By contrast, Waismann had little influence in the UK where Neurath, already marginalized, had died in 1945. (The full story of logical empiricism’s acculturation in the English speaking world remains to be written, but see Howard 2003, Reisch 2005, Uebel 2005a, 2010, and Douglas 2009 for considerations of aspects of Vienna Circle philosophy that were neglected in the process and remained long forgotten.)

2.2 Activities

After its formative phase which was confined to the Thursday evening discussions, the Circle went public in 1928 and 1929 when it seemed that the time had come for their emerging philosophy to play a distinctive role not only in the academic but also the public sphere. In November 1928, at its founding session, Schlick accepted the presidency of the newly formed Verein Ernst Mach (Association Ernst Mach), Hahn accepted one of its vice-presidencies and Neurath and Carnap joined its secretariat. Originally proposed by the Austrian Freidenkerbund (Free Thinker Association), the Verein Ernst Mach was dedicated to the dissemination of scientific ways of thought and so provided a forum for popular lectures on the new scientific philosophy. In the following year the Circle stepped out under its own name (invented by Neurath) with a manifesto and a special conference. The publication of “The Scientific World Conception: The Vienna Circle”, signed by Carnap, Hahn and Neurath and dedicated to Schlick, coincided with the “First Conference for the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences” in mid-September 1929, organised jointly with the Berlin Society as an adjunct to the Fifth Congress of German Physicists and Mathematicians in Prague (where Frank played a prominent role in the local organising committee). (On the production history and early reception of the manifesto see Uebel 2008.) A distinct philosophical school appeared to be emerging, one that was dedicated to ending the previous disputes of philosophical schools by dismissing them, controversially, as strictly speaking meaningless.
Throughout the early and mid-1930s the Circle kept a high and increasingly international profile with its numerous publications and conferences. In 1930, the Circle took over, again together with the Berlin Society, the journal Annalen der Philosophie and restarted it under the name ofErkenntnis with Carnap and Reichenbach as co-editors. (Besides publishing original articles and sustaining lengthy debates, this journal featured selected proceedings of their early conferences and documented the lecture series of the Verein Ernst Mach and the Berlin Society as well as their international congresses.) In addition, from 1928 until 1936, Schlick and Frank served as editors of their book series “Schriften zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung” (“Writings on the Scientific World Conception”), which published major works by leading members and early critics like Karl Popper, while Neurath served, from 1933 until 1939, as editor of the series “Einheitswissenschaft” (“Unified Science”), which published more introductory essays by leading members and sympathisers. Conference-wise, the Circle organized, again with the Berlin Society, a “Second Conference for the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences” as an adjunct to the Sixth Congress of German Physicists and Mathematicians in Königsberg in September 1930 (where Reidemeister played a prominent role in the organization and Gödel first announced his incompleteness result in the discussion) and then began the series of International Congresses on the Unity of Science with a “Pre-Conference” just prior to the start of the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy in Prague in September 1934. This, their last conference in Central Europe, was followed by the International Congresses of various sizes in Paris (September 1935, July 1937), Copenhagen (June 1936), Cambridge, England (July 1938), Cambridge, Mass. (September 1939), all in the main organized by Neurath; a smaller last gathering was held in Chicago in September 1941. By 1938 their collective publication activity began to centre on a monumentally planned International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, with Neurath as editor-in-chief and Carnap and Charles Morris as co-editors; by the time of Neurath’s death in 1945, only 10 monographs had appeared and the series was wound up in 1970 numbering 20 monographs under the title “Foundations of the Unity of Science” (notably containing Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst them).
Individually, the members of the Vienna Circle published extensively before, during and after the years of the Circle around Schlick. For some (Frank, Hahn, Menger, Neurath), philosophy was only part of their scientific output, with numerous monographs and articles in their respective disciplines (mathematics, physics and social science); others (Schlick, Carnap, Feigl, Waismann) concentrated on philosophy, but even their output cared relatively little for traditional concerns of the field. Here it must be noted that two early monographs by Schlick (1918/25) and Carnap (1928a), commonly associated with the Vienna Circle, mostly predate their authors’ participation there and exhibit a variety of influences not typically associated with logical positivism (see section 3.7 below). Moreover, important monographs by Frank (1932), Neurath (1931a), Carnap (1934/37) and Menger (1934) in the first half of the 1930s represent moves away from positions that had been held in the Circle before and contradict its orthodox profile. Yet the Circle’s orthodoxy, as it were, is not easily pinned down either. Schlick himself was critical of the manifesto of 1929 and gave a brief vision statement of his own in “The Turning Point in Philosophy” (1930). A long-planned book by Waismann of updates on Wittgenstein’s thought, to which Schlick was extremely sympathetic, was never completed as originally planned and only appeared posthumously (Waismann 1965; for earlier material see Baker 2003). Comparison with rough transcripts of the Circle’s discussions in the early 1930s (for transcripts from between December 1930 and July 1931 see Stadler 1997 [2001, 241–299]) suggest that Waismann’s Wittgensteinian “Theses” (Waismann 1967 [1979, Appendix B]) come closest to an elaboration of the orthodox Circle position at that time (but which remained not undisputed even then). Again, what needs to be stressed is that all of the Circle’s publications are to be understood as contributions to ongoing discussions among its members and associates.

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The Basics: People, Activities and Overview of Doctrines 2.1 People

2.2 Activities

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The Basics: People, Activities and Overview of Doctrines 2.1 People