David Edmonds's Reading List

"Practical Ethics came out in 1979, just before I began studying philosophy. I loved its rigour, and I found Peter Singer almost impossible to argue with. I agreed with almost every position he took on every issue. There were chapters on abortion, on animal rights, on how much money we can give to the poor. It’s really the blueprint for everything he’s written subsequently. He is prolific, but if you want to know what Singer believes on a given topic, you may as well go back to Practical Ethics . There’s a whole chapter on the fact that if we know that people are going to die in the Third World and we fail to do something about it, we’re as responsible for their murder as if we put a bullet through their heads. It’s a very practical book which addresses these controversial issues. I became a vegetarian at university after reading it, so it had a big effect on my life. I’ve since moved away from his very rigid utilitarianism on other topics, but I still find his arguments about how we should treat animals very persuasive. He says that to claim that humans are more important than animals merely because they’re human would be what he calls “speciesist”, and no different from saying that white people are more important than black people merely because they’re white. If you say that humans are more important than animals, you have to give a reason. You have to say it’s because they’re smarter, or have the ability to plan for the future. Now if you accept that premise – and I don’t see how you can’t – then there is a real problem of humankind’s overlap with some animals. If you say that what matters is our ability to plan for the future, then what about babies, or people with severe Alzheimer’s or who are mentally retarded, who don’t have that ability any more than chimpanzees do? Why do you think they are more morally important than animals? So once you accept the premise, you have to take animal suffering a bit more seriously. Singer says that suffering matters wherever it is produced, and we should care about the suffering of any sentient creature. If we think that the benefit we get from eating meat doesn’t outweigh the incredible suffering of factory farming, then we should give up eating meat. And that’s why I’m a vegetarian . But Singer is completely logical about it. He accepts that if you were to eat only free range animals who lived a happy life at the end of which they were killed, there is almost nothing wrong with that. So there’s no reason why you can’t be an ethical meat eater, but you have to choose what meat you eat."

"This is a wonderful book, and completely different from Singer’s, although it’s also a series of chapters on different themes to do with life and death. He has a wonderful essay on equality, a great essay on war, and essays on consciousness as well, which is what makes living things different from dead things. What I love about Nagel is his ability to identify what really matters about a subject, and to write about it without getting caught in too much nitty-gritty detail. He’s a beautiful writer, and this and his subsequent book The View From Nowhere are two of my favourite philosophy books . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Nagel introduces in this book something that is completely counterintuitive until one thinks more deeply about it, namely panpsychism – the idea that inanimate objects might have atoms in which there is a conscious element. That sounds very weird until you think about human beings. We are created out of physical stuff, so where does the magical stuff of consciousness come from? Perhaps the answer is that the little bits of stuff which we thought was physical also contains within it some of this subjectivity, even if at a subatomic level. That seems crazy, but when you think about it, it has some plausibility to it. That’s a very good question. The reason why you can’t throw yourself is because you’re not fat enough. That’s why the fat man has to be fat. The correct solution to the problem is to jump yourself and not kill anybody, but you can’t do that in this case, because you’re not fat. Quite possibly."

"This is a book of two halves. The first half is written by a very eminent Australian philosopher and I can’t remember a word of it, but the second half was important to me. I was a pretty pure utilitarian until I read it, and it countered a lot of the influence of Peter Singer. Williams is a critic of utilitarianism – he thinks it is a deeply simplistic way to view the moral world. He gives a couple of famous examples which illustrate why, and which show the aspects of morality which utilitarianism can’t capture. The first example is this. Imagine you’re in a Latin American country, and you come across a guerilla leader who is about to kill 20 Indians (a somewhat politically incorrect use of that term). He says, if you kill one of them, I won’t kill the other 19. Should you do it? Williams says that from a utilitarian point of view, of course you should kill the one person to save the other 19. But that’s to miss that it’s you who’s doing the killing. Utilitarianism sees everything from a bird’s eye view, and doesn’t realise that you’re involved with the consequences of your actions. The second example is a character called George, who is very anti nuclear power. He’s short of money, needs work and is offered a job in a biochemical plant. The job pays well – means he can look after his wife and kids – and although he doesn’t believe in the work, if he doesn’t do it then someone else will do it even better, and promote this industry which he objects to. Williams again says that from a utilitarian point of view, George should take the job. But that fails to capture the question of integrity. Associating your life and career with something that you so deeply resent and oppose would be an attack on your integrity. You could give that answer, but that’s an answer within the utilitarian framework. That’s saying that utilitarians have just got the calculation wrong – that they think this would make the world happier, but it won’t. To some extent you can quantify happiness. You know that 19 lives are better than no lives, for instance. Happiness is not an easy thing to measure, but you can say sensible things about what makes people happy and what doesn’t. But while your objection is saying that from a utilitarian point of view it might be wrong, Williams argues that even if utilitarians say the answer is clear-cut that George should take the job, that misses the issue of integrity."

"Reasons and Persons was written in 1984, and Derek Parfit was one of my postgraduate supervisors. One of the blurbs on the back of book says “ Reasons and Persons is a work of genius”, and I think it is. It’s an incredibly important book, and one written in a tradition completely different to Bernard Williams , even though the two were friends. Bernard Williams is an essayist and he looks at the big picture, like Nagel. Parfit, more like Singer, is in the tradition of the 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick – he is a detailed, rigorous, almost mathematical philosopher, who worked from premises slowly to conclusions. There’s nothing pretentious about it – it’s beautifully written, incredibly thoughtful and well-argued, with fantastically imaginative thought experiments. I’m particularly interested in the final chapter, about our obligations to future generations. There are various paradoxes that he tries to resolve. Here’s one of them. Suppose you knew that if you were to have a child, the child would have a terribly wretched life – it would be miserable, suffer for some years and then die. Would it be a bad thing to bring that life into the world, if it was going to be unremittingly miserable? Most people would agree that it would be. So does that then mean that it’s a good thing to bring a life that is better than nothing into the world? If you say it is, you get involved in what he calls the “repugnant conclusion”. Imagine a world with a trillion people in it, all of whose lives are only slightly better than nothing – they have enough to eat and drink, but there is nothing really fulfilling about their existence. They aren’t leading the sort of flourishing life that you have, doing Five Books interviews. Compare that with a world in which there are only a few billion people, all of whom have a very high standard of living. Most people would say that the latter is better than the former. But if you think there is something worthwhile about every life where there is more happiness than there is suffering, then you reach the repugnant conclusion, which is that the world with a trillion people is better, because of the cumulative happiness of that greater population."

"Parfit was my BPhil supervisor, Janet was my DPhil supervisor. I kept it in the family. This is another book that comes from the same generation of 25 years ago. It may be that books of that era have had more influence on me because I was young and impressionable, or it may be that it was simply a generation of really talented philosophers. I love this book because it is again incredibly rigorous, analytic and not at all sentimental or wishy washy. It is what it says on the cover – there’s a feminist component to it, and a sceptical component to it. It came out in the late seventies, a time when people were still barred from jobs on grounds of sex. Janet makes the point – which others had made before, including John Stuart Mill – that this makes no sense. If you say no women should be bus drivers because they’re not capable enough or whatever, then you don’t need a rule that no women should be bus drivers. All you need is a rule saying that no one who isn’t capable of driving a bus should be a bus driver, which removes sex from the issue. That’s the feminist bit. And the book is sceptical because it doesn’t take a position on some of the empirical claims about sex, such as whether men’s and women’s brains are different in any way, or whether men and women have naturally different interests or approaches. It doesn’t take any position on that, and leaves the empirical facts to be uncovered and argued about elsewhere. So she is feminist, but sceptically so. Janet’s most recent book is about the morality of organ donation. People die every day because there is a shortage of organs. One moral question is if we should allow people to sell their organs. Would that help to solve the shortage problem? It might not. It might be that if you put a price on it, fewer people would sell their organs – or it might be that lots of people would and you would solve the crisis. That’s the empirical problem. The philosophical dispute is whether it would be justifiable to have a trade in organs. Somebody from the conservative wing of bioethics is Michael Sandel. He would be aghast at the commodification of certain things, including organs. But it’s difficult to figure out just why it would be wrong for you to be allowed to sell your organs. If you’re presented with all the choices, and you think this is your best choice, why should I deprive you of the opportunity of exercising your liberty? Who am I to say you can’t do what you want with your body? If you fully understand the implications, what right do I have to deny you that decision? From a utilitarian perspective, it certainly could be. I think the reason why people recoil from that idea is because they think the person is making an empirical mistake. They think that they are falling for short termism, and will get a pleasure boost but in the long run will live to regret it. That may be true, in which case from a utilitarian point of view they are making a blunder. But perhaps they will survive to a good old age with one kidney, without noticing the absence of their other one, and get enormous pleasure from using their iPad to access Five Books. I would sell my kidney for my son’s life, or a Nobel prize."

"Well for autobiographical reasons, really; without Ayer my book would not have been written. More than that, without Ayer, I may not have gone into philosophy in the first place. He captured me—or enticed me—into the world of philosophy, as he did many people. I read Language, Truth and Logic when I was 19. I was a militant atheist, as Ayer probably was. I thought that belief in God was not only stupid, but harmful as well. And Ayer provided me with the ammunition, as a teenager, to be entirely dismissive of religion and—I feel embarrassed about this now—entirely dismissive of religious believers too. In a way, it’s going even further, it’s even more of a fundamental objection to religious belief. He’s saying that religious believers can’t even discuss the nature of religion in the way they purport to, because, although they are uttering words, those are just a series of sounds that don’t connect to reality in any way. It’s a very radical critique of aspects of religious belief. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Of course, there are cultural aspects of religious belief that are entirely okay to discuss. So, it’s perfectly okay to say that X per cent of people are Christian or Muslim and that these people believe in X, Y and Z and that they engage in the following rituals…. The sociology of religion and the history of religion are unthreatened by logical empiricism, but statements such as ‘God believes that we should all behave in this way or in that way’—those are the sorts of propositions that Language, Truth and Logic attacks. Correct. That includes ethics, aesthetics and the parts of religion we’ve been talking about here. The first line of the book is: “The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.” And then, on the first page, he goes on to attack “metaphysical utterances”. The logical empiricists have various enemies. But, really, a principal enemy is Heidegger. They thought that, essentially, Heidegger thought and spoke meaningless gibberish; that he purported to be deep and profound, but that many of his famous statements about ‘nothingness’ and so on, didn’t connect to the world in any way. They were literally meaningless. They might have had some kind of emotional impact on us, but they had no cognitive meaning. They thought that if you wanted to say something of emotional depth, philosophy wasn’t the appropriate vehicle. If you wanted to have a deep impact on people about the beauty and awe-inspiring nature of the universe, you should really be writing poetry or novels, not philosophy. That was Ayer’s view and the view of the logical empiricists. “When people talk about the Vienna Circle, they’re usually referring to the…meetings that would take place on a Thursday evening in the mathematics institute in Boltzmanngasse” The appeal of Language, Truth and Logic is that it’s a very short book—it’s only about a hundred and fifty pages long—and he doesn’t brook any doubt. It’s a book packed full of certainty. It’s polemical and it was very important in the history of logical empiricism because it brought the ideas of the logical empiricists from Vienna into the Anglo-American world. Almost all the Vienna Circle ended up in the Anglo-American world and had an impact on its philosophy, but it was this book, in particular, that translated the ideas of the Vienna Circle to the Anglo-American world and made them popular. Bizarrely, the second edition, which came out just after World War II, became a bestseller. Yes. He spent several months there after taking his undergraduate degree. His German was rudimentary, so he was relatively quiet during meetings; unusually quiet, because he was normally quite garrulous. He happened to be there at the same time as Willard van Orman Quine , who was another visitor, from the United States. Quine was a much better linguist: he participated more fully in Circle meetings. But the two of them got to know each other quite well in Vienna. You wouldn’t necessarily pick this up from Ayer’s book, but within the Vienna Circle there was very strong disagreement. They disagreed about many aspects of the Verification Principle and how it could be applied in various domains. Ayer’s view is, in some sense, a simplistic version of the Circle’s position – and certainly not one that everybody in the Circle would have signed up to. But, if you read it when you’re nineteen, as I was, it’s very exciting. And historically it was important in its influence on British philosophy. Yes. They do vary in personality. There isn’t one homogeneous personality. I don’t think the leader of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick, was a ‘smasher’. I don’t think he wanted to take a big mallet and hit other philosophers over the head with it. But there were certainly members of the Circle—and Otto Neurath is a classic example—who were mallet grabbers and smashers and who really did want to make a noise and cause damage. It’s true that their philosophy was very radical, but some of them wanted to whisper about it, and others wanted to shout about it. Schlick was a whisperer; Neurath was a shouter. Yes. Their philosophy was iconoclastic, but they didn’t all share a view about the tone in which their philosophy should be broadcast to the world. Their famous manifesto, which was written in 1929 to thank Moritz Schlick for staying in Vienna when he could have taken a job elsewhere, summarizes their vision and ideas, but was not written by Schlick. Schlick was slightly embarrassed about the tone of it; it was more strident than he was comfortable with. It was strident because one of the lead authors was Neurath, and, as I’ve said, that was his character. But, you’re right, the philosophy itself was iconoclastic."

"You really, really should read it, not because of the Vienna Circle, but just as a work of literature. It is a beautiful book. As a chess player, I first came across Zweig’s novella The Royal Game , which is a wonderful short story about chess . It’s a great book, but The World of Yesterday is regarded by many Zweigians as his masterpiece. It’s an autobiography, but it’s also a biography of Vienna, really. And it’s incredibly poignant, because the day after he dispatched the manuscript in 1942—by which time he had left Vienna for the UK and then gone to the States, before reaching his final destination in Brazil—he and his wife killed themselves. Yes, it does. Some of it predates the Vienna Circle. It’s about the world of Klimt and Schiele, for example, the world of Mahler and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler. It certainly is. Klimt and Schiele are a bit before the Circle. Schiele died incredibly young – he was only 28 – in 1918, so before the Circle got going. The book portrays Vienna in its golden era and the passing stars in it are people like Klimt and Schiele, Mahler, and of course Freud. The book is also important for me in relation to the discussion we had earlier about the backgrounds of the Vienna Circle members. Zweig was from a similar background. He was middle-class and Jewish but wasn’t observant. In one sense, he was established and successful and he saw himself as part of German high culture. Beethoven was one of his gods, as he was for so many Viennese. Wittgenstein described Beethoven as his god. “Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was the most amazing place…It can be compared to Athens in 400 BC, or Florence during the Renaissance” Zweig was bourgeois, successful and established – and, yet, vulnerable. The book is suffused with a sense of foreboding about what’s around the corner. Of course, he was writing about his past from the vantage point of knowing what was to happen – not surprisingly, the book is nostalgic for the earlier, fin-de siècle Vienna, and the Vienna of the 1910s and 20s. I should add that he doesn’t just paint a golden picture of Vienna. He describes Vienna during the Great Depression and how miserable it was for a very large chunk of the Viennese population. While explaining how bad things got after the hyperinflation of the 1920s, he notes that a shoelace came to cost as much as an entire luxury shop with a stock of 2,000 pairs of shoes. And repairing a broken window became more expensive than building the whole house had once been. It’s very vivid. It’s a wonderful depiction of just how crazy hyperinflation had become in the mid-1920s. I think it’s absolutely essential. And that’s what I didn’t understand before I began to write the book. I came to believe that the attack on metaphysics is not just philosophical, but political . I’ve always believed that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, unlike Frege’s anti-Semitism, was deeply embedded in his philosophy, which makes him, in some ways, a much more reprehensible figure—and certainly a much more pernicious philosopher, in my view. And there’s definitely a connection between some of the pseudo-metaphysics and Romanticism of the far right and logical empiricism’s attack on metaphysics. Well, obviously, they had their philosophical objections. But what was driving that emotionally was a fear of fascism. And for very good reasons. The far right had all these metaphysical propositions at the heart of its philosophy: the connection with the ‘ Heimat ’ – the homeland; the idea of a group, the Volk , that was somehow more than the sum of the individuals; the idea of a spirit, and a movement of history. All these notions and sentiments, which were part of that metaphysical tradition, were deeply threatening on a personal level to members of the Vienna Circle. You’re right. Hegel was a target. It would be going too far to say they were Marxists, with one or two exceptions, including, again, Otto Neurath. He’d spent some of his career working on command economies. In World War I , he had spent time looking at how you could set up a command economy and why that might be more successful, he argued, than one based on free markets. That’s a proposition that we now regard as absurd, I think. Most of the rest of the Circle, with the notable exception of Schlick, were people of the left, rather than Marxists. You might call them socialists, but not Marxists. Yes, with the exception of Neurath who, I think, might have signed up to the movement-of-history aspect of Marx… Yes. Marx has a sort of analytic approach to why society is bound to progress and eventually end up in the proletarian revolution. That is an empirical claim, as Popper famously pointed out. If Marxism is a science, which Marx himself claimed it to be, then, Popper said, it had to make these verifiable or, as he would put it, falsifiable claims. And, as Popper pointed out, Marx made many claims that turned out to be false. It was science in Popperian terms. It was just bad science. That’s right. Popper’s point was that Marx had come up with this hypothesis, this theory. It might be based on sound reasoning. Maybe you look at his premises and you think that they make sense. You can see how he reached his conclusions. But then you look at the predictions, and many of them turn out to be false. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, in that sense, you’re right. It may have been a perfectly reasonable theory, which has nonetheless been falsified and so needs to be rejected. Or you can take the approach that Popper was even more critical of: namely, you reinterpret Marxism in a way that is never falsifiable. You explain every exception away, so that nothing is falsifiable. And if you do that, Popper says, you’re not engaging in a genuine scientific enterprise."

"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!"

"He’d just turned 27. He was born in 1903. Yes. The word ‘genius’ is bandied around, but with Ramsey, it is clearly totally appropriate. He was Cambridge-based. He did his undergraduate degree at Cambridge. And, already as an undergraduate, he was recognized as a great mind. He has several connections with the Vienna Circle. Most importantly, he went off to Austria when he was still an undergraduate to visit Wittgenstein, who at that stage had become a primary school teacher in small villages in southern Austria. He went to talk to him about his German manuscript, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , which Ramsey then translated. So, he’s a very important figure in Wittgenstein scholarship. He was his first translator, which is remarkable, given how young he was at the time. Wittgenstein himself, of course, was an important inspiration for the Vienna Circle. Yes. Now, Cheryl Misak makes two very important claims in connection with Ramsey and the Vienna Circle. She claims that it was Ramsey’s discussion with Moritz Schlick that brought the Tractatus to the attention of the Circle. No. At least – according to Cheryl – they didn’t know about the Tractatus . She notes a reference to Schlick talking about the Tractatus , in which he mentions his discussions with Ramsey. It may be that that was the first time Schlick became aware of the Tractatus . And then he brought it to the attention of the Circle – and then they went through it literally line-by-line. The second huge claim she makes about Ramsey and the Circle is that it was Ramsey who gave the Circle the idea that mathematics should be treated as consisting of analytic propositions. There had always been a puzzle about how to treat mathematics. Was it empirical? Was 2+2=4 out there in the world, to be observed, as some philosophers of mathematics have believed? That was John Stuart Mill’s approach to mathematics. According to Cheryl Misak, it was Ramsey who put into the minds of the Vienna Circle the idea that perhaps mathematical proofs should be treated like logical tautologies—propositions like ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’—that mathematical proofs are true by definition. And yet Cheryl Misak’s written this beautiful book. It’s a huge book, 500 pages, and I don’t think anybody will ever attempt—this is my scientific, falsifiable prediction!—another biography of Ramsey again. Yes, a clever technique. She did get experts to write these boxes, which are often very technical. She doesn’t exactly encourage the reader to bypass them, but she says it’s forgivable if they do! As well as the connections we’ve been talking about between Ramsey and the Circle, she’s very interesting on Ramsey in Vienna. As I mentioned, Ramsey first went to Austria specifically to talk to Wittgenstein. But then he went back – this time to Vienna – to be psychoanalyzed. He’d had a disastrous love affair and going to Vienna was THE place, of course, to be psychoanalyzed. You didn’t go to your local psychoanalyst in London. Yes, although Ramsey is one of the people who helped spread the word about psychoanalysis back in the UK and, specifically, in Cambridge. The elite Cambridge intellectual society, The Apostles, discussed the status and nature of psychoanalysis. Yes. For the purposes of this Five Books interview I wanted to choose one book that was specifically focused on a character who was either in the Circle or linked to the Circle. Ramsey was one of those characters. I could have chosen a whole array of very good books about some of the other characters in the Circle. Rebecca Goldstein has written a lovely biography of Gödel, for example. The other book that I was tempted to choose was Malachi Haim Hacohen’s incredible work of scholarship about the first half of Popper’s life, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945, which goes from Popper’s birth in 1902 to the publication of The Open Society and its Enemies at the end of World War II . It’s the formative period in Popper’s life, before he became famous. It grounds Popper’s ideas in the milieu of Vienna and of the Circle. He’s very forgiving of Popper’s very difficult character—Popper was a notoriously difficult man. Because Hacohen regards him as a genius, he’s more tolerant of some of his character flaws than others have been. He goes too far, I think, in forgiving him for the way he treated other people. Yes, but with this difference: Ray Monk interprets Wittgenstein’s personality ‘issues’ as saintliness, or maybe eccentricity, or, more fundamentally, that Wittgenstein acted out of a sense of obligation to fulfil his brilliance. In other words, he gives them a good motive. Hacohen doesn’t go that far. He doesn’t say that it’s perfectly alright that Popper was a bully. He says that Popper’s behaviour should be put in context, and my sense is that he thinks it’s kind of irrelevant, given the weight of his genius. The other thing I would say is that Wittgenstein has a much stronger claim to the label of ‘genius’ than Popper. So, if you’re going to use the Hacohen excuse for personality weaknesses, then it’s better used for Wittgenstein than for Popper."

"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"