Vienna Circle

Vienna Circle (German, Wiener Kreis), group of philosophers and scientists who met periodically for discussions in Vienna, Austria, during the 1920s and 1930s, and proposed a controversial conception of scientific philosophy. Initiated by the mathematician Hans Hahn and centred around the philosopher Moritz Schlick, it also included Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Viktor Kraft, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann, and counted Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger, and Edgar Zilsel among its associates. The Circle's activities were confined to private meetings until 1929, when they began publishing several series of monographs and collaborated with the Berlin Society of Empirical Philosophy (which included Hans Reichenbach and C. G. Hempel) in organizing international conferences and editing the journal Erkenntnis (“knowledge”). The death and dispersion in exile of key members from 1934 onwards did not mean the extinction of Vienna Circle philosophy, however. Through the incessant revision and refinement of earlier theses by émigré members and others, so-called logical positivism strongly influenced the development of analytic philosophy—occasionally suffering outright distortions of its original ideas.

The Circle's influences were Ernst Mach, Jules Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem, and Albert Einstein concerning empirical science, and Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, and early theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein on formal science; it was opposed to neo-Kantianisms and German and Catholic idealisms. Most strikingly, the Circle rejected the need for metaphysics and for an epistemology that bestowed justification on scientific knowledge claims from beyond science itself. An empiricist meaning criterion such as the “verification principle”, which required that statements be either empirically verifiable or analytical, would, they argued, exhibit the knowledge claim of science and simultaneously eliminate metaphysics as meaningless. (Unconditional norms were also robbed of their cognitive base.) Yet, critics asked, what is the status of such a criterion? Carnap's suggestion that it represents not a discovery but a convention, a proposal for future scientific language use, deserves to be taken seriously, for it amplifies the Circle's “linguistic turn” according to which philosophy is concerned with ways of representing, rather than the nature of the represented. Since a satisfactory formalization of the meaning criterion was never achieved, however, one must note that the Vienna Circle was neither a monolithic, formalist, nor a necessarily reductionist philosophical movement. In its time and place, it was a minority voice; the socio-political dimension of its theories—stressed by Neurath—as a renewal of enlightenment thought against the then-rising tide of fascism is gaining recognition. After the celebrated “death” of reductionist logical positivism in the 1960s, the historical Vienna Circle is re-emerging, revealing strands of reasoning still significant for post-positivism.