Vienna Circle

The Vienna Circle were a group of philosophers who gathered round Moritz Schlick, after his coming to Vienna in 1922. They formed a philosophical association named the Ernst Mach Association to discuss matters scientific social and philosophical. Amongst their members were Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Phillip Frank, Kurt Gödel, H. Hahn, V. Kraft, Otto Neurath and F. Waismann. Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein on occasion attended their meetings and the tone of their ideology was strongly influenced by Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

So that's who they were, now why were they, what did they do and what hapened to them. First the why. Note the year, Germany, post WW1. Germany had just suffered a massive and humiliating defeat at the hands of the allied powers. The Germans needed a scapegoat for this and they chose science. It was felt that science had promised them victory and now must be blamed for defeat. The intellectual mood of the country swung away, not just from science but from rationalim itself. This can be seen by the rise at that time in proponants of spiritualism, of epic cycles and the abundance of fin de sciecle literature. The whole mood was captured by Oswald Spengler's book The Decline of the West. In this work Spengler argued that Western Civilisation had come to to the end of it's natural cycle and was doomed to dissapear. A very Hegelian idea. This book became a standard piece of work in most German literary households at that time. Other writers across Europe were writing in the same theme, notably Yeats as can be seen in his poem The Circus Animals Dissertation. Arguably this idea led to modernism which in it's turn led to postmodernism.

The Rationalists of the day were horrified at this turn away from science. Planck writes at the time "the iconoclast has entered the temple of science" in reference to the idea that science did not hold absoloute truth. The Vienna Circle attempted to rectify this by setting forth a program to determine what truth was and what knowledge could be considered valuable. I know this sounds like a cliched and tired idea, but these philosophers were the first to programatically explore the question in relation to science. Before them science had simply been accepted due to it's successes. Here is the first attempt to defend it a priori.

For this reason they named themselves after Ernst Mach and clearly took on thet mantle of the empiricisit. They helped to produce the doctrine of logical positivism and this is how they did that ...

They created the Verification Criteria of Meaning, with this tool they attempted to reassert the physical sciences in the position od authority that they had in pre world war Germany. The effect was mixed.

In general their arguments were ignored by the Germans, but had a huge influence on the development of the philosophy of science. The German Nation had its frustrations channelled against ethnic minorities. Most of the Vienna Circle were Jewish and eventually were hounded out of their academic positions.

One of the Vienna Circle faild a student who was a Hitler sympathiser. The student assassinated his tutor on the steps of the university and evaded prosocution. I can't currently remember which Vienna circle member this happened to but when I do I will update this node. By 1935 the Vienna Circle ceased to be yet their arguments remain with us to this day.

thanks to Colorless Green Idea for some of the names