On the Prehistory of Physicalism

INTRODUCTION. THE COLLECTIVE DIMENSION: EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE VIENNA CIRCLE The so-called Vienna Circle of logical empiricism first came to public attention in 1929 with the publication of a manifesto entitled Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific World-Conception. The Vienna Circle). Published for the Ernst Mach Society, this influential philosophical manifesto - dedicated to Moritz Schlick, the titular leader of the Vienna Circle - was signed by Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, who may be regarded as its editors and, with Herbert Feigl, its authors (Mulder 1968). The name “Vienna Circle” was originally suggested by Otto Neurath, who wanted to evoke pleasant associations with the “Vienna woods” or the “Viennese waltz” by alluding to the local origin of this collective (Frank 1949, 38). The plan for this publication was set in motion when Moritz Schlick, who had come to Vienna in 1922 to take up a professorial appointment previously held by Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann (and Adolf Stohr) and had founded the Vienna Circle in 1924, received a lucrative offer from the University of Bonn at the beginning of 1929. The threatened departure of Schlick was to be prevented by a joint official declaration of solidarity by the members of the Vienna Circle, the Ernst Mach Society (of which he was the head from 1928 to 1934), and further sympathizers with the cause of scientific philosophy.

Within much of the current historiography, the relationship between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle is discussed in terms of a virtually one-sided relationship: a direct influence by Wittgenstein upon the circle (For a general overview of the most recent literature on Wittgenstein, including, in particular, his relation to the the Vienna Circle, see Frongia and McGuinness 1990; Drudis-Baldrich 1992; Baker 2003). In fact, this stereotypical approach seems confirmed in some of the self-portraits that have been offered by members of the circle (Frongia and McGuinness 1990, 17–26). Correspondingly, in the Circle’s manifesto (1929), its views were illustrated with the following dictum of Wittgenstein: “What can be said at all, can be said clearly” (The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (1929 manifesto) in Neurath 1973, 306; Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1922), 4.116). This quotation was meant to underscore their shared anti-metaphysical purpose. To be sure, the subsequent assertion that the scientific world conception knows “no unsolvable riddles” steered the Circle’s reception of Wittgenstein—at least that of its left wing around Hans Hahn, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath—in a direction that Wittgenstein must have abhorred, for his intention was not to mobilize a philosophical collective into an anti-metaphysical commando squad. Rather, as has now been clearly established, he wished to engage in a process of linguistic criticism and clarifying intellectual labor, morally and therapeutically oriented in the manner of Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schonberg (On Wittgenstein in his socio-cultural context see Janik and Toulmin 1973. For the most recent intellectual biographies see McGuinness 1988; Monk 1990. On analytic philosophy in the framework of Austrian intellectual history see K. R. Fischer 1991): a philosophical counterweight to both the mannerisms of literary supplements and the metaphysically idle elements of everyday language. These thinkers were concerned with a type of objectivity that was directed against any linguistic acrobatics and aimed at establishing the limits of that realm which can only be “shown” in language. Wittgenstein formulated this basic stance succinctly in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker: what was at stake here for him was the demarcation of ethics “from the inside,” against the realm of the verifiable propositions at work in the natural sciences (Wittgenstein to Ludwig von Ficker (Oct.–Nov. 1919) in Wittgenstein 1969, 35: “Namely, I wanted to write that my work consists of two portions: what is here available, and everything that I haven’t written. And it is precisely this second portion that is the important one. Namely, through my book the ethical is, as it were, delimited from within….”). What we have is thus a dualism of facts and values in an ideal, picture-theoretical linguistic framework. Its result was, for Wittgenstein, the emergence of the unsayable or ineffable as central categories in the realms of philosophy, religion, art, and literature. In contrast, in their focus on Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle concentrated almost entirely on the anti-metaphysical implications of the logical analysis of language for the realm of the sayable. It did so knowing it received a dose of mysticism in the bargain (a fact that Neurath, in particular, would note critically time and again). Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that in letters to his admirer Friedrich Waismann—the latter had been working fruitlessly on a popular version of the Tractatus since 1929—Wittgenstein offered an extremely negative opinion of the circle’s program (Mulder 1968, 389 ff).

Revisiting Galison’s ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’ in light of Neurath’s philosophical projects

This paper offers a preliminary study of Otto Neurath's philosophy of science. Neurath was a key member of the Vienna Circle in the early twentieth century. His point of view in relation to scientific knowledge was a minority in the circle, different from other members like Schlick and Carnap. In recent years it has been rediscovered and has entered the mainstream of Anglo-American epistemology and philosophy of science. Neurath's ideas of anti-foundationalism, opposition to fixed methods in practical science, and his holism anticipated the work of later naturalists and pragmatists W. V. Quine, Kuhn and Feyerabend who criticized the 'orthodoxy' of logical empiricist philosophy of science. This paper examines Neurath's notions and shows they were also contained in his holistic concept of 'unified science'.

Austria and Hungary both cultivated philosophical traditions oriented toward analytical, social, and scientific concepts: the Galilei and the Sunday Circles in Budapest, and the Vienna Circle. These informal institutions and their discussions produced mathematicians, philosophers, sociologists, and art theorists whose ideas were influential well into the 1960s, went far beyond Europe, and have direct relevance to the present time. Gyorgy Lukacs, Karl Mannheim, Karoly and Mihaly Polanyi, Gyorgy Polya, and Bela Balto are some who have felt this influence, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Godel, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Karl Popper, and Ernst H. Gombrich — just to name the most well known. There were also those less well known, such as Leo Popper, who had propagated the term “open art works” as early as 1906, and the precursor of systems theory, Bela Zaiai. In particular, the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ernst Mach can scarcely be overestimated. John Blackmore demonstrates the effect that Mach had on Hungarian scientists (Todor von Karman, Gyorgy von Bekesy, Gyorgy von Hevesy, John von Neumann, Jeno Pal Wigner, Leo Szilard, and Ede Teller). E. Leinfellner convincingly shows, however, that Fritz Mauthner influenced Wittgenstein. C.J. Nyiri analyzes the specificities of Hungarian and Austrian philo-sophy from the perspective of the humanities.

For those interested in the history of philosophy of science, logical empiricism holds a special attraction. Like old sepia-toned photographs of ancestors who made our lives possible by surviving wars, emigrations, and the vicissitudes of times gone by, logical empiricism holds the nostalgic allure of the smoky Viennese cafes where much of it took shape some eighty years ago. The setting and the story are irresistible. In the Vienna of Freud, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century luminaries, the philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians making up the Vienna Circle were surrounded by intellectual creativity. They themselves were on the front lines of the century's exciting developments in physics and logic. The core members included Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Godel, Philipp Frank, and Otto Neurath, while their colleagues and devotees in Europe and America included Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, and W. V. O. Quine. Until the circle's dissolution and demise in the early 1930s, these present and future leaders in philosophy met regularly at the University of Vienna and at various cafes to debate their ideas about knowledge, science, logic, and language. As they sipped coffee and lit their pipes, they ignited nothing less than a revolution in philosophy and bequeathed to us the discipline we know today as philosophy of science. Nostalgia, of course, carries little philosophical weight.

Thomas Uebel’s penetrating book represents the latest outcome of a series of investigations on Otto Neurath and the “forgotten” Vienna Circle he has published over the last ten years. Within the recent galaxy of studies devoted to logical empiricism, the re-evaluation of Neurath’s all too neglected work as well as of the “first” Vienna Circle are unquestionably very much indebted to Uebel’s contributions, which may be considered, in turn, an original development of Rudolf Haller’s pioneering studies on Austrian philosophy and on its leading role in the rise of the Vienna Circle. In particular, the attention paid by Haller to Neurath’s surprising epistemological actuality and moreover the “new light” he shed on the “first” Vienna Circle (Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath in the years between 1907 and 1912)1 constitute the core of Uebel’s wide program of historical and, at the same time, philosophical research. An ambitious, but successful programm, that nowadays appears to us as essentially accomplished.2

The Left Vienna Circle, Part 1. Carnap, Neurath, and the Left Vienna Circle thesis

It has been assumed that the logical empiricism of ‘the Vienna Circle’(Wiener Kreis) greatly influenced on the formalization of utility and rationality in welfare economics in the 1930s. However the actual historical relationship between logical empiricism and economic science in the early twentieth century has not been still sufficiently examined in the literatures on the history of economic thought. In the 1910s, Otto Neurath (1882–1945), the leader of the Circle, was developing, as economic science, an empirical study on human welfare, titled ‘Felicitology’ that was rather different from the ‘new’ welfare economics. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate Neurath’s felicitology as ‘the other welfare economics’ and its relation to his ideas on socialization and planning. Through this investigation, I show the possibilities of the empirical and critical economics developed from the philosophy of logical empiricism in the early twentieth century, which are markedly different from the ‘rational choice’ model as a purely psychological discipline based on formalized ‘self-interests’. The analysis would also present a critical perspective on the conventional interpretation of the relationship between social sciences and logical empiricism.KeywordsOtto NeurathLogical empiricismFelicitology Homo economicus RationalitySocialization

In this paper I would like to discuss some normative aspects of Otto Neurath’s concept of scientific knowledge. I will take some reflections of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist known for his harsh criticism of “philosophers” as a point of reference. I have decided to employ his “non-philosophical” perspective because of its convergence with the very tradition to which the Institute Vienna Circle has aligned itself. That tradition derived the form and power of its beginnings from the unbiased attitude, the impartiality of its intellectual and scientific standpoint. This impartial attitude was all but naive I wish to claim; it was the result of a conscious effort to liberate the philosophical vision from the sediments of a history of perception and thought that had reached its end in the 19th century.1 Of course, that that history had come to its end was felt by many scientists, philosophers and artists at the beginning of this century. What distinguished the Vienna Circle was that its members reacted with new insights into the nature of knowledge, indeed with the attempt to develop the impartiality of the scientific point of view. What had been in the foreground up to that time receded into the background for those versed in modern formal logic and empirical science. The disciplinary boundaries, most notably those between the natural sciences and the humanities (Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften) became blurred. What we know became so complex and rich that traditional forms of classification were revealed as inadequate. For Neurath “Unified Science” was the name for future forms of classification and “encyclopedia” the name for the “orchestration” of the individual sciences. What remained of “philosophy” focussed on the logical analysis of language and — long neglected — the historical and practical aspects of science. Taking these general developments as my background here I want to defend the thesis that working on the “impartiality” of the scientist’s point of view can be seen as a contribution to and work on the normative dimensions of knowledge. In the case of the Vienna Circle and Otto Neurath such a contribution has nothing to do with developing a scientific conception of ethics or rationality.2 Rather it represents an attempt to analyze the scientific approach to reality and to reinforce the social effects of this approach by making it more precise. Viewed in this context Neurath’s project of a “scientific world conception” coincides with some perspectives whose topicality cannot be overestimated, Pierre Bourdieu’s epistemological reflections on sociology among them.KeywordsScientific KnowledgeSocial RealityScientific ObjectRelative AutonomyVienna CircleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The thesis I present for examination is this. Even before the founding of the so-called Vienna Circle around Moritz Schlick, there existed a first Vienna Circle with Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath. This circle is of such constitutive importance for the formation of the circle around Schlick that the judgement can be justified that it was really Hans Hahn who founded the Vienna Circle. To draw attention to this I call the one the first, the other the second Vienna Circle.

[In Menger's Reminiscences this part is Chapter Five (‘Vignettes of the members of the Circle in 1927’), where Moritz Schlick is described as ‘an extremely refined, somewhat introverted man’; Hans Hahn, ‘a strong, extroverted, highly articulate person who always spoke with a loud voice’; Olga Hahn Neurath, ‘always smoking a big cigar’; Otto Neurath, ‘a man of immense energy and curiosity, very fast in grasping new ideas, through an often distorting lens of socialist philosophy’; Rudolf Carnap, ‘systematic, sometimes to the point of pedantry…a truly liberal and completely tolerant man’; Victor Kraft ‘[who] like Schlick, Feigl and myself, by no means shared all the political ideas and ideals of Neurath’; Friedrich Waissman, ‘a very clear expositor [who] unfortunately dragged out his studies [of mathematics and philosophy] at the University’; Herbert Feigl, ‘[who] did probably more than anyone else to make some of the Viennese ideas known in America’; Theodor Radakovic, ‘a student of Hahn's…too shy to take part in the discussion of the Circle, although he attended the meetings regularly’; Edgar Zilsel, ‘a militant leftist [who] wanted to be considered only as close to, and not as a member of, the Circle’; and Felix Kaufmann, ‘a philosopher of law, an ardent phenomenologist, the only participant with a true sense of humour’ (Menger, 1994, pp. 55–68). These following parts are those unpublished].

Otto Neurath is being rediscovered. The present collection of essays on his philosophical thought, the first in the English language, makes accessible the important results—so far available only in German—of a distinctive group of scholars who have been in the forefront of this rediscovery. The essays translated in this volume treat what has been a forgotten dimension of the history of Anglo-American analytical philosophy in the Vienna Circle; as such, they provide a complement to the recently reawakened interest in the theories of Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick. At the same time, the essays collected here document a recent chapter of Continental analytical philosophy—what could be called ‘the Austrian school of Neurath criticism’—and so testify to a particularly interesting aspect of the ‘internationalisation’ of the analytical idiom. It is the merit of these essays to show that, when taken seriously, Neurath reveals himself to be a serious thinker, one whose belated recognition is bound to transform the picture of the past of analytical philosophy.

The Vienna Circle was, as the research of recent decades made abundantly clear, far from a homogeneous group of philosophers (nor an always harmonious one). This can be shown with regard to the way different general philosophical and cultural influences affected the views of different members, but also with regard to the way in which the doctrines of specific philosophers closely associated with the origin of logical empiricism were received. Wittgenstein is a case in point. This paper sets out, with the help of a few indicative examples, how the critical reception of the Tractatus by Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath—former members of an informal pre-World War 1 discussion group, the so-called first Vienna Circle—and by Rudolf Carnap reflected their pre-existent theoretical interests. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus contributed to their developing philosophy but was far from its foundation, contrary to what has often been presumed about the relation of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle.KeywordsWittgensteinVienna CircleMoritz SchlickFriedrich WaismannRudolf CarnapHans HahnOtto Neurath

It is one of the distinctive claims of Neurath, though not of the Vienna Circle generally, that the Vienna Circle's philosophy was not really German philosophy at all. The relation is, if Neurath is to be trusted, anything but straight-forward. To understand it, not only must some effort be expended on specifying Neurath's claim, but also on delineating the different party-lines within the Vienna Circle.