The murder of Professor Schlick : the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle / David Edmonds.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Edmonds, David, 1964- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Vienna circle--History.

Vienna circle.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (349 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2020]

Summary:

The story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's historyOn June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason.The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat.The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Prologue: Goodbye, Europe

2 Little Rooster and the Elephant

3 The Expanding Circle

4 The Bald French King

5 Wittgenstein Casts His Spell

6 Neurath in Red Vienna

7 Coffee and Circles

8 Couches and Construction

9 Schlick’s Unwelcome Gift

10 Strangers from Abroad

11 The Longest Hatred

12 Black Days in Red Vienna: “Carnap Expects You”

13 Philosophical Rows

14 The Unofficial Opposition

15 Now, You Damn Bastard

16 The Inner Circle

17 Escape

18 Miss Simpson’s Children

19 War

20 Exile

21 Legacy

Dramatis personae

Chronology

Notes

Select bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691185842

0691185840

OCLC:

1202624839