Jan 20, 2021 07:37 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 20, 2021 07:45 PM by C C.)
Testing postitivism: "The Murder of Professor Schlick" brilliantly illuminates an ambitious movement in philosophy
https://standpointmag.co.uk/testing-positivism/
EXCERPTS: David Edmonds’s lively and engaging book traces the development of Schlick’s circle, later the Vienna Circle, from its formation after the First World War to the 1930s [...] This group of “scientifically literate scholars” included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, logician Kurt Gödel, mathematician Hans Hahn, and charismatic sociologist Otto Neurath ... Though much divided these thinkers, they were bound by a common enemy: metaphysics.
Drawing on the work of Bertrand Russell and the physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach ... and with (non-Circle member) Wittgenstein as their unwilling guiding star, they argued that science was a logical structure built through the accretion of experience. Only statements that were empirically verifiable had meaning. By definition, therefore, any assertion that relied instead on reason or intuition, assertions about ethics, say, or God, was meaningless: it asserted nothing at all. For a time, mid-century, the Circle’s logical positivism was, in Edmonds’s words, the “most ambitious and fashionable movement in philosophy”.
[...] Since Kant, philosophers had upheld the notion of synthetic a priori truths, truths that could be deduced without any knowledge of the world and which created the basis for understanding it: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, say, or all events have a cause. Einstein’s theories defied the validity of these truths. Crucially, too, they were testable.
Relativity had no politics but, as fascism burgeoned, so too did the recasting of Einstein’s work as “alien” physics, a euphemism for Jewish. The same hostility attached itself to logical positivism. [...] most of the Vienna Circle (though not, ironically, Schlick himself) were Jewish or half-Jewish or married to Jews. More importantly, in its determination to upend the old order, their thinking was deemed to be “Jewish” ... under Nazi rule, most of its members had fled Vienna for good.
These academic refugees brought logical positivism to the UK and the USA where it briefly flourished. It did not endure. The British philosopher, A.J. Ayer, a one-time evangelist, asserted in the 1970s that the greatest defect of logical positivism was that “nearly all of it was false”. What is less well remembered is that he qualified this statement by adding that it was “true in spirit”.
Edmonds acknowledges that the Vienna Circle is now generally regarded as a “long philosophical cul-de-sac” but, in this post-truth era of fake news and populist nationalism, he stresses the enduring importance of that spirit, its legacy of intellectual rigour, the interrogation of meaning and “the calling out of nonsense”... (MORE - details)
https://standpointmag.co.uk/testing-positivism/
EXCERPTS: David Edmonds’s lively and engaging book traces the development of Schlick’s circle, later the Vienna Circle, from its formation after the First World War to the 1930s [...] This group of “scientifically literate scholars” included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, logician Kurt Gödel, mathematician Hans Hahn, and charismatic sociologist Otto Neurath ... Though much divided these thinkers, they were bound by a common enemy: metaphysics.
Drawing on the work of Bertrand Russell and the physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach ... and with (non-Circle member) Wittgenstein as their unwilling guiding star, they argued that science was a logical structure built through the accretion of experience. Only statements that were empirically verifiable had meaning. By definition, therefore, any assertion that relied instead on reason or intuition, assertions about ethics, say, or God, was meaningless: it asserted nothing at all. For a time, mid-century, the Circle’s logical positivism was, in Edmonds’s words, the “most ambitious and fashionable movement in philosophy”.
[...] Since Kant, philosophers had upheld the notion of synthetic a priori truths, truths that could be deduced without any knowledge of the world and which created the basis for understanding it: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, say, or all events have a cause. Einstein’s theories defied the validity of these truths. Crucially, too, they were testable.
Relativity had no politics but, as fascism burgeoned, so too did the recasting of Einstein’s work as “alien” physics, a euphemism for Jewish. The same hostility attached itself to logical positivism. [...] most of the Vienna Circle (though not, ironically, Schlick himself) were Jewish or half-Jewish or married to Jews. More importantly, in its determination to upend the old order, their thinking was deemed to be “Jewish” ... under Nazi rule, most of its members had fled Vienna for good.
These academic refugees brought logical positivism to the UK and the USA where it briefly flourished. It did not endure. The British philosopher, A.J. Ayer, a one-time evangelist, asserted in the 1970s that the greatest defect of logical positivism was that “nearly all of it was false”. What is less well remembered is that he qualified this statement by adding that it was “true in spirit”.
Edmonds acknowledges that the Vienna Circle is now generally regarded as a “long philosophical cul-de-sac” but, in this post-truth era of fake news and populist nationalism, he stresses the enduring importance of that spirit, its legacy of intellectual rigour, the interrogation of meaning and “the calling out of nonsense”... (MORE - details)
