The Vienna Circle () of logical empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick. The Vienna Circle had a profound influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially philosophy of science and analytic philosophy.
The philosophical position of the Vienna Circle was called logical empiricism (German: logischer Empirismus), logical positivism or neopositivism. It was influenced by Ernst Mach, David Hilbert, French conventionalism (Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem), Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Einstein. The Vienna Circle was pluralistic and committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment. It was unified by the aim of making philosophy scientific with the help of modern logic. Main topics were foundational debates in the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics; the modernization of empiricism by modern logic; the search for an empiricist criterion of meaning; the critique of metaphysics and the unification of the sciences in the unity of science.
The Vienna Circle appeared in public with the publication of various book series – Schriften zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung (Monographs on the Scientific World-Conception), Einheitswissenschaft (Unified Science) and the journal Erkenntnis – and the organization of international conferences in Prague; Königsberg (today known as Kaliningrad); Paris; Copenhagen; Cambridge, UK, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its public profile was provided by the Ernst Mach Society (German: Verein Ernst Mach) through which members of the Vienna Circle sought to popularize their ideas in the context of programmes for popular education in Vienna.
During the era of Austrofascism and after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany most members of the Vienna Circle were forced to emigrate. The murder of Schlick in 1936 by former student Johann Nelböck put an end to the Vienna Circle in Austria.
History of the Vienna Circle
The history and development of the Vienna Circle shows various stages:
The "First Vienna Circle" (1907–1912) The pre-history of the Vienna Circle began with meetings on the philosophy of science and epistemology from 1908 on, promoted by Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn and Otto Neurath.
Hans Hahn, the oldest of the three (1879–1934), was a mathematician. He received his degree in mathematics in 1902. Afterwards he studied under the direction of Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna and David Hilbert, Felix Klein and Hermann Minkowski in Göttingen. In 1905 he received the Habilitation in mathematics. He taught at Innsbruck (1905–1906) and Vienna (from 1909).
Otto Neurath (1882–1945) studied mathematics, political economy, and history in Vienna and Berlin. From 1907 to 1914 he taught in Vienna at the Neue Wiener Handelsakademie (Viennese Commercial Academy). Neurath married Olga, Hahn's sister, in 1911.
Philipp Frank, the youngest of the group (1884–1966), studied physics at Göttingen and Vienna with Ludwig Boltzmann, David Hilbert and Felix Klein. From 1912, he held the chair of theoretical physics in the German University in Prague.
Their meetings were held in Viennese coffeehouses from 1907 onward. Frank remembered:
A number of further authors were discussed in the meetings such as Brentano, Meinong, Helmholtz, Hertz, Husserl, Freud, Russell, Whitehead, Lenin and Frege.
Presumably the meetings stopped in 1912, when Frank went to Prague, to hold the chair of theoretical physics left vacant by Albert Einstein. Hahn left Vienna during World War I and returned in 1921.
The formative years (1918–1924) The formation of the Vienna Circle began with Hahn returning to Vienna in 1921. Together with the mathematician Kurt Reidemeister he organized seminars on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus and on Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.
With the support of Hahn, Moritz Schlick was appointed to the chair of philosophy of the inductive sciences at the University of Vienna in 1922 – the chair formerly held by Ernst Mach and partly by Boltzmann. Schlick had already published two important works Raum und Zeit in die gegenwärtigen Physik (Space and Time in contemporary Physics) in 1917 and Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (General Theory of Knowledge) in 1918.