The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle

"The Vienna Circle was a group of scientists and philosophers who met regularly in Vienna to discuss the nature of meaning, trying to get clear about what we can meaningfully say. Wittgenstein was a major influence on them. They were extreme empiricists. They felt that many things which passed for meaningful statements about the world were in fact literally meaningless and shouldn’t be given much attention because they were untestable. They famously dismissed such utterances, often, as metaphysics . This is most clearly evident in A.J. Ayer’s summary and interpretation of the core ideas of some of the Vienna Circle’s thinking which was published in 1936 as Language, Truth and Logic . Ayer was a very young man at the time. He’d been to Vienna and attended meetings of the Circle, trying to understand what they were discussing. He focused on some of the key ideas and then wrote this iconoclastic book where he said that basically—and this is the key idea of the Vienna Circle—any meaningful statement must be either true by definition (like two plus two equals four, or, to take the clichéd example, ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’) or else empirically verifiable or falsifiable. It’s a two-pronged test for meaningfulness, basically. If it’s neither true by definition nor is there any empirical test which could show that it’s either true or false, then it’s literally meaningless. And when you apply this—as the Vienna Circle and various other people have tried to do—to areas of philosophy, it turns out that much metaphysics, where people reflect on the nature of reality, whether everything is one or whether being infuses the world and so on, turns out to be literally meaningless and not even any good as poetry, because it wasn’t written to be beautiful or rhythmic or whatever. Members of the Circle shared respect for science, for logic, and for mathematics, and a keen desire to find the limits of what can be meaningfully said. It was a movement that had an immense influence on 20th century philosophy, not just because of Ayer’s dissemination of the ideas in Britain, but because with the rise of Nazism, partly because many of the thinkers connected with the Vienna Circle were Jewish, and partly because of the effects of the Anschluss and then the Second World War, the group disseminated around the world, principally to the UK and America and continued to have a strong influence there. David Edmonds is my co-podcaster for Philosophy Bites and also a friend. He’s famous for an earlier book, Wittgenstein’s Poker , which is about a dispute that took place in the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. Wittgenstein was alleged to have shaken a poker in a threatening manner at Karl Popper and then stormed out. That book is a brilliant exploration of different people’s interpretations of that event and how the different people remembered it differently and what the significance of the conflict between the two philosophers was. That incident does re-appear in this book, and Wittgenstein and Popper are both important characters here as well. This latest book is a kind of broadening of the milieu, the context of that dispute. It’s quite complex in the sense there are many different intertwined life stories involved. Many of them have a similar trajectory and many of those trajectories don’t have happy endings. What David has managed to do is combine the biographical and historical with the philosophical, without getting too technical. A lot of the philosophy of the Vienna Circle was quite hard core, but he doesn’t get bogged down in the details. This is a book that’s accessible to a general reader. He’s very good about making clear what the importance of the debates they were having was, what their limitations were, why they were or were not influential, as well as telling these stories which connect very strongly with the rise of Nazism, including the murder of the title of the book. Schlick was a major figure in the Vienna Circle, and was murdered by a young man with psychiatric problems, but there was a reaction by some people that actually the murder wasn’t such a bad thing. So, there’s a murder at the heart of the book, there’s the rise of Nazism, the melting pot of Viennese intellectuals, the sense of impending disaster that was evident from the political divisions within Vienna and the anti-Semitism and sympathy of many Viennese for the Nazi standpoint. It made Vienna in the 1920s and early ’30s both an exciting and dangerous place to be, where ideas really mattered. What went on in the coffee houses in Vienna wasn’t just idle chat, people were passionate about their beliefs. This is the world of Freud, it’s where Wittgenstein came from, Karl Popper too… The key figures were Kurt Gödel, the mathematician—he was probably the most famous— Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Moritz Schlick. They were inspired not just by philosophy but by contemporary physics, Einstein and his contemporaries. It’s really high-powered stuff. David has chosen a different route from Cheryl Misak. He hasn’t invited experts on the particular papers of the Vienna Circle to say why particular positions they took were important, but he’s given an overview, a flavour, and an assessment. What’s odd is that it has always been recognized in British philosophy just how important the Vienna Circle was for understanding the way philosophy went in the 20th century in Britain and America and Australia and various other parts of the world, but there have been very few books covering this movement. There’s a recent book about the Vienna Circle, Exact Thinking in Demented Times , but not much else. David’s take is that, ultimately, the core ideas of the verification principle in their strict formulation failed on their own terms. It’s not even clear that the verification principle itself passed its own test for meaningfulness. Nevertheless what he calls “the self-identifying merits of analytic philosophy”, such as its “meticulous attention to logic and language and the pursuit of clarity, the contempt for grandiosity, and the calling out of nonsense…suspicion of arguments that rely on ‘feel’ or ‘intuition’ over substance” – all these features of this iconoclastic movement and the way its members went about doing philosophy have certainly had an afterlife in academic philosophy and will continue to do so. The Vienna Circle helped foster a climate in which “they are so much taken for granted that they are virtually invisible”. There are a number of tragic personal stories within the book as well. It’s like sad music. It’s quite a poignant book. Yes, David has actually had two books out this year. I thought Undercover Robot , which I wanted to mention in passing, was excellent as well. It’s a story about an intelligent robot. It’s very witty with lots of in-jokes that adult philosophers will spot as they read this to their children."