The Vienna Circle

"It’s a very odd book in many ways. It’s 983 pages long. It contains bits of documents, short biographies of all the members of the Vienna Circle, minutes of some of the meetings. For anybody interested in source material for the Vienna Circle, it’s absolutely indispensable. It was very important for me because it contains some of the documents linked to the murder of Moritz Schlick; he was killed by a deranged student. There are various court documents associated with that murder in the book. There are also some articles that appeared after Schlick’s shooting, in which one person in particular—basically a Nazi philosopher—came out in support of the murder, saying it was justified. This book is not bedside reading. But if you’re interested in the Vienna Circle, this is the book to go to for source material. It doesn’t really have a narrative, no. It lurches from one part of the Circle to another. A whole section is just lists of biographies. It came out in 2001 and it’s the culminating work of the author, a lovely man called Friedrich Stadler. He founded and was the long-term director—I think he’s just now retired—of the Vienna Circle Institute , which is based in Vienna and is devoted to keeping the ideas of the Vienna Circle alive and to studying the history of the Vienna Circle. I would say it’s a very generous book because it’s a book that passes on to the future historian or biographer a great wealth of material and puts it all in one place. So it’s not a book you would go to for narrative, but it’s a book you would go to for facts!"