Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science

"It appealed to me because of the title. I love the title. I’d seen some random reference saying it was a brilliant book and when I’m really busy, a nice little treat is to buy a book (although then, often, I’ve got no time to read it). So I bought it and I found it a really good read. I don’t know much about the Vienna Circle, or logical positivism, or mathematics or quantum physics, and a lot of it’s about that. But what I liked about it is that it’s one of those intellectual histories that tells you the story of a time and place, and relates that context to why the ideas turned out the way they did. This was obviously Vienna between the wars—a particularly fragile time, looking back at it. Hence, I suppose, ‘demented’ in the title. Logical positivism does have some link to economics. Obviously it affected philosophy and gave us that linguistic turn in philosophy which always made me so impatient because I thought, ‘Why on earth are they debating these trivial differences in meaning when it’s perfectly clear what it means? Just pull yourself together!’ But it also affected economics, through Lionel Robbins in particular. Robbins wrote a book in 1932 called An Essay on the Significance of Economic Science and he was much influenced by logical positivism. His argument was that you could separate the positive and the normative aspects of economics. In other words, you could separate means and ends. It wasn’t the job of economists to talk about the ends of public policy or the management of the economy. That was for politicians or the people to debate and was about moral values. It had nothing to do with the economist who was a technocrat looking at positive means to the end that had been determined somewhere else. This was a complete break with tradition in welfare economics. Pigou had explicitly said that you can’t separate the values from the recommendations that you make. Though it’s not in the book, there is this link to economics, which is why it’s worth understanding logical positivism. There’s also some nice stuff in the book about early visualizations. One of the members of the Vienna Circle was called Otto Neurath and he invented data visualization. He set up an institute for pictorial statistics and they came up with these pictures of little human figures that you see so much in data visualizations these days. He had a whole museum in Vienna devoted to data visualizations of the economy and society. I feel we should know about it in general, yes. The other issue it raised for me was thinking about the times. We live in demented times as well, don’t we? I’ve been finding it very troubling reading writers from that era. Another is Stefan Zweig, who wrote a fantastic book called The World of Yesterday . He and his wife fled Austria before the Nazis started imprisoning Jews. He talked about that boiling-the-frog phenomenon. People carried on living their normal lives and things got worse little bit by little bit. And by the time they realized it had changed a lot it was too late. So most of them didn’t escape. It’s that sense of the fragility of all this brilliance in demented times that I found quite poignant about this book."

"I was aghast when this book came out. I was already several years into research for my own book. There was no decent biography of the Vienna Circle, and I was hoping that mine would be the first. And then this came out. So, I was a little depressed. I was relieved by a number of things. Firstly, Sigmund is much less interested in the philosophy than I am. It’s a biography of the Circle and it does a little of what my book does. It’s partly about Vienna and it places the Circle in a Viennese context. But Sigmund is a mathematician and so, more than my book, it is about some of the puzzles and mathematical conundrums that some Circle members were interested in—Gödel in particular. There’s a lot in his book about somebody I barely mention in mine, David Hilbert, a celebrated mathematician. “Logical empiricists have various enemies. But, really, a principal enemy is Heidegger” It goes a lot into Gödel and his incompleteness theorems, which I cover only a little, although these theorems are fundamentally important in the history of logic. So, for anybody who’s interested in the mathematics and the logic of the Vienna Circle, this is a very good accompanying text to mine. I would say he’s slightly less interested in the culture than I am. I was very interested in what motivated the Circle and where they’d come from and their backgrounds and why they came to hold the positions they did. And I was particularly interested in what it was about the Circle that made them such a threat to the fascists and the Nazis. The Sigmund book closes in the late 1930s, whereas I was also interested in what happened to the Circle members after the war begins and they disperse. I’ve got quite a big section on that. So it’s a different kind of book, but complementary. ‘Fizzle’ is a good word. People forget about the history of Vienna. It wasn’t the Nazis but the Austrian fascists, the Fatherland Front, who took over in 1934. And the Austrian fascists and the Nazis were separate parties, indeed competing forces. The Austrian fascists were Austrian nationalists. The Nazis, of course, have a ‘Greater Germany’ foundation to their fascism. For those on the far right, the Austrian nationalists were a nationalist alternative to Nazism. When the Nazis came in following the Anschluss in March 1938, they took over, not from a democratic form of government, but from the Austro-fascists. Nonetheless, the logical empiricists were a threat both to the Austrian fascists and to the Nazis. When the Austro-fascists came to power in 1934, they effectively shut the logical empiricists down. The Circle stumbled on, in a kind of dispersed form, until 1936, but already individual members were desperately trying to leave. An early member, Herbert Feigl, got away as early as 1931. Another important member of the Circle, Karl Menger, went to live in the United States. Otto Neurath had to flee because he was both a Jew and a Communist, and so doubly doomed. He escaped to Holland, then the UK. Schlick’s murder in 1936, though, was really the death knell of the Circle. They dispersed in many different directions. Popper ended up in New Zealand. Most of the rest made it to the UK or the US. I think only two members of the Circle stayed in Vienna and survived the war, keeping their heads down. But the refugees in the UK and US breathed new life into Anglo-American philosophy. Circle members were now widely scattered and could no longer gather together. There was no Internet or Zoom. Different centres of logical empiricism sprang up, but the heyday was over. Yes, the importance of logic, the analysis of language, the role of empiricism. It’s almost impossible to imagine current analytic philosophy without the part played by logical empiricists and the way they spread their influence around the English-speaking world. And I would still defend the spirit of logical empiricism. I remain suspicious when I hear somebody making a claim that doesn’t seem to have any connection with what can be tested or falsified! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"