The Vienna Circle

Abstract

Philosophers are not generally known for being team players. Philosophical ideas may sometimes be attributed jointly to two or more thinkers, but it often turns out that these people disagreed on fundamental issues, or that they worked in separate countries or even separate centuries. John Locke and George Berkeley are both regarded as influential ‘British Empiricists’, yet much of Berkeley’s major published work was dedicated to arguing against Locke (Berkeley 1710). Gottlob Frege and P. F. Strawson are credited with introducing the logical account of presupposition that is sometimes referred to as the ‘Frege-Strawson account’. But Frege worked and wrote in late nineteenth-century Jena, Strawson in mid-twentieth-century Oxford (Frege 1892, Strawson 1950). Even when philosophers manage to coincide and apparently to agree, they are generally reluctant to admit that they form an identifiable group or collective. The widespread use of the term ‘ordinary language philosophy’ would seem to suggest that a particular approach, or school, predominated in Oxford in the years after the Second World War. But those who worked in Oxford at this time, and to whom the label has been applied, have been keen to deny that any such school even existed (see, for instance, Grice 1986: 50).