Day: June 22, 2022

 

Joan Weiner, Taking Frege at His Word, Oxford University Press 2020, xxvii + 317 pp.

In 1936 Edmund Husserl wrote in a private letter to Heinrich Scholz, the collector of Frege’s writings, that he had never met Frege in person and that Frege was considered at the time “a sharply intelligent outsider who bore fruit neither as a mathematician nor as a philosopher.”[1] That was, of course, a misjudgment. We can see now more clearly that Frege contributed, in fact, at least three things to mathematics and philosophy after him. The first was his new logic (the propositional and predicate calculus) that replaced the old Aristotelian logic. Given the important role that the Aristotelian syllogistic had played in philosophy for more than two thousand years that was, indeed, a significant achievement. The second was Frege’s attempt to show that arithmetic can be reduced to logic. Frege’s logicist thesis has not remained uncontested and his way of trying to prove it has turned out to be defective, but the considerations that led him to it are still being taken seriously by philosophers of mathematics. The third are his thoughts about signs – the symbols and formulas of his logical calculus and the words and sentences of ordinary language – and the way they serve to convey meaning. These “semantic” considerations have contributed much to the subsequent development of the philosophy of language.[2]

Joan Weiner’s new book pays a great deal of attention to the logical calculus that Frege developed, his Begriffsschrift, whose originality and significance she fully recognizes. Her account of that logic is detailed, precise, and illuminating. She also acknowledges clearly that Frege constructed his logic precisely to establish the truth of the logicist thesis. According to her: “Frege was engaged, for virtually all his career, in a single project: that of showing that the truths of arithmetic are truths of logic.” (p. vii) For all that, she does not delve far into the philosophy of mathematic and Frege’s place in it. She does not concern herself, in particular, with the difficulties the logicist thesis faces and whether it can be salvaged. Her discussion focuses, rather, on the question whether or to what extent we should think of Frege as a philosopher of language.

The object of her critical attention is specifically what she calls “The Standard Interpretation” of Frege’s work which she summarizes in four points: (1) Frege aimed at constructing a theory of meaning, (2) he sought to develop a compositional semantics, (3) he was concerned with giving metatheoretical proofs in his logic, and (4) he was an ontological Platonist. Weiner’s ambition is to set out an interpretation of Frege that is “deeply at odds with the Standard Interpretation.” (p. ix) That interpretation, she believes, is now so deeply entrenched in the literature that it takes a most careful re-reading of Frege’s words to dislodge it. In undertaking that task, Weiner seeks to expose “the difference between the words that actually appear on Frege’s pages, and the words that many contemporary philosophers believe are on Frege’s pages.” (p. 10)

Weiner’s book puts forward a compelling case for rejecting all the four assumptions of the Standard Interpretation that she identifies. Others, myself included, have repeatedly made similar claims. This leaves me with two questions. The first is whether she does full justice to the adherents of the Standard Interpretation and the second whether her alternative interpretation gives us a fully rounded view of the real Frege. As to the first question, we need to consider that when philosophers read the writings of others they are sometimes motivated by the question “what did the author mean by his words?” and sometimes with the question “what can we do with the author’s words?” And these two questions are not always clearly distinguished in their minds. They are trying to get at the meaning but always with an eye to the usefulness of what they find to their own way thinking. And they also often assume that what they themselves think may be a clue to what the other author must have meant. This is the way Aristotle read the Presocratics and Plato’s dialogues and this is how contemporary philosophers read Frege among others. From a scholarly and hermeneutic perspective that can be annoying. It is from this point of view that Weiner’s irritation with the adherents of the Standard interpretation stems.

Weiner traces the belief that we should read Frege as being primarily a philosopher of language and theorist of meaning back to Michael Dummett’s seminal book Frege: The Philosophy of Language from 1973. I find myself agreeing with her that Dummett is mistaken in maintaining that Frege’s explicit goal was to construct a theory of meaning for natural languages. But this does not undermine the fact that Frege did, indeed, make observations that have since led to the construction of such theories. Weiner does not explore the question how Dummett came to read Frege in the way he did. She seems to ascribe it simply to a lack of reading skill. That surely does injustice to Dummett’s competence as a philosopher.  We can grant that Dummett overstated his case, but that may still leave it worth asking why he came to read Frege the way he did. This is not something Weiner is interested in. Dummett was, of course, well aware of Frege’s preoccupation with the logicist thesis.  But by the time he wrote Frege: The Philosophy of Language he had given up on the idea that this thesis could be salvaged and he had opted instead for an intuitionist constructivism. That view, as developed by Brouwer, Heyting and others, seemed to him, however, to lack a proper philosophical grounding. Expanding the constructivist view to non-mathematical statements, Dummett ended up questioning Frege’s apparently “realistic” conception of meaning and its associated notion of truth in the hope of developing in this way an alternative constructivist sort of semantics. His engagement with Frege had turned thus into dialogue concerning language and meaning.

That linguistic turn in the interpretation of Frege was not entirely Dummett’s doing. He had, in fact, been anticipated in this by Wittgenstein. It is Wittgenstein more than Russell who has brought Frege to the attention of English-speaking philosophers and he was concerned from early on more with Frege’s thoughts on language and meaning than with his logicism. That logicism he had already rejected in the Tractatus and over time he was to become increasingly sympathetic to the mathematical formalism that Frege had so vigorously attacked.  He remained, however, very much interested in Frege’s thoughts on language and meaning. Not that he found all of it plausible. Like Dummett after him, he completed rejected Frege’s idea that propositions are names of a sort and that they refer to truth-values. But he remained attracted to Frege’s principle that words have meaning only in the context of a sentence which he repeated both in the Tractatus and in Philosophical Investigations. He also retained an interest in Frege’s distinction between the sense and the reference, the Sinn and the Bedeutung, of words and sentences to which he returned again in those two books while giving the distinction his own very different slant. When Max Black consulted with him over which of Frege’s writings he might most usefully translate into English, Wittgenstein advised him to take on the essay “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” The translation appeared in Philosophical Review in 1948 and was the first piece of Frege’s writings available in English. For many English-speaking philosophers it became the gateway into Frege’s thinking and it is still today the one piece of Frege’s work with which students are most familiar. It is this text more than any other one in Frege’s oeuvre that may give the impression that he was a philosopher of language, that he sought, in fact, to advance a theory of meaning for ordinary language, and that this theory had the intended form of a compositional semantics.

Weiner is right in arguing that this imisinterprets Frege’s intentions. She writes that in order to understand Frege’s purpose in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” we must read the essay as one of three which together set out a major revision of the Begriffsschrift logic of 1879. The first and most important of those pieces is the monograph “On Function and Concept,” (1891), the second the essay on “Concept and Object,” (1892) and the third “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,”(1892). This last essay was, in effect, a mere corollary to  the initial monograph and quite possibly only a belated addition. That it did not refer to Frege’s logical calculus but discussed the issues only in terms of examples taken from ordinary language was the result of limitations set by the editor of the journal in which Frege published the essay.[3] Frege had argued in “On Concept and Object,” among other things, for a revision of his earlier account of identity and “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” was meant to show that this revision called for a distinction between the sense and the reference of signs that he had not made in the first exposition of his logic in 1879. While I find myself in substantive agreement with Weiner’s account of “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” I don’t think that she takes her case far enough. She does not ask herself, in particular, why Frege considered his revision of the earlier account of identity was so important. The answer, I believe, is to be found in the fact that the axiom V he was to add to his logic in Basic Laws in order to achieve the desired derivation of arithmetic is for Frege an identity statement and one that, according to the 1879 characterization of identity would not have counted as a logical truth. Frege’s new account of identity allowed him, however, to argue that the two parts of axiom V conjoined by the identity sign do not only have the same reference (that axiom V is true) but also that they have the same sense and that this allows us to see that the axiom is a logical truth. I have myself argued repeatedly for that view since 1980.[4] I am surprised to find that Weiner does not pursue that point.

I agree once more with Weiner that the single most important new idea in Frege’s logic of 1879 was his introduction of the concept of function and that the single most important revision of his logic in 1891 concerned that notion. In terms of the history of mathematics, Frege should be seen as a descendant of the Gaussian school for which the notion of a mathematical function had become increasingly important. Frege himself had studied at Göttingen, the headquarter of the Gaussians, and so had his teacher and mentor Ernst Abbe. Both Abbe and Frege had, moreover, worked on the theory of function. Frege’s Habilitationsschrift of 1874 had dealt with the topic even before his interest in logic and the logicist thesis had developed. This function-theoretical view stood in contrast to the set theoretical conception, elaborated by Cantor, for which functions were simply certain kinds of ordered sets. Weiner bypasses this historical context and thus misses out on two important insights into Frege’s work. The first is the conflict between the function-theoretical and the set-theoretical view of logic in which the former was represented by Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein but in which the latter has largely prevailed. The second is the paradox that Frege’s attempt to show that the truths or arithmetic are truths of logic required as a first step a mathematization of logic.

Her silence on this historical context is characteristic of Weiner’s entire approach to Frege. Her book is an exemplar of classical analytic philosophy: clear, organized, thoroughly argued, but moving in a narrow circle of formal concepts and in this respect almost old-fashioned in style. It has certainly all the limitations of classical analytic philosophy in particular in being so thoroughly unhistorical.  Concepts exist for this kind of thinking in a vacuum and their meaning and interrelations can be analyzed without reference to any historical realities. In this respect, Wiener is certainly just like Michael Dummett, whom she otherwise dismisses. Dummett once wrote that Frege’s thought sprang from his head almost entirely unfertilized by outside ideas. In her own account of Frege, Wiener tells us correctly that Frege was for much of his philosophical life preoccupied with sowing that arithmetical propositions are logical truths. But she does not and cannot explain to us why this project should have mattered to him. Ordinary mathematicians and everyday used of mathematics may, in fact, not be much concerned with this matter. But it is one of major importance for Kant and subsequently for John Stuart Mill, both figures of the greatest significance, as Frege was writing. Frege himself made clear in his Foundations of Arithmetic that he sided with Kant’s apriorism and against Mill’s radical empiricism.  This conformed to the position of the Neo-Kantians of Frege’s own time. For both Kant and Mill the question of the epistemic status of mathematics was a key to their thinking very broadly about human knowledge and the way it maps on to the world.

Weiner describes Frege’s new logic as “a major advance”; but over whom and over what? She mentions Boole in this respect, but one would think that Frege’s logic was first of all an advance over the Aristotelian syllogism and then over the logics developed by some of his contemporaries (Lotze, Sigwart, Wundt, to name a few). One thing that distinguished Frege from all of these is that he approached logic from the perspective of a mathematician. We can discern this most clearly in his introduction of the notion of function into his logic. Mathematically inspired was also his use of inductive proofs in his logic. The paradox is that Frege sought to reduce arithmetic to logic by making logic more mathematical. The first to understand this circularity in Frege’s argument was Wittgenstein who, for this reason, rightly rejected Russell’s and Frege’s logicist program.

Weiner’s preoccupation with showing the failings of the standard interpretation limits her reading of Frege also in some further respects. She has no interest in the fact Frege was almost as much interest in geometry and its foundations as he was in arithmetic. It is not easy to say what this came to. His discussion of this topic in The Foundations of Arithmetic is rudimentary and other relevant (but unpublished) writings were destroyed in the Second World War. But there can be no doubt that Frege was committed to the idea of synthetic apriori truths.

However far she seeks to distance herself from the way analytic philosophers read Frege today, she stays close to them in one significant respect. Her reading of Frege is just as ahistorical as theirs. Frege’s own words remain for her placed in a historical vacuum and so are the words of those who subscribe to the Standard Interpretation. We are told in neither case from where those words come. That limits what we can learn from Weiner’s take on Frege. Why did he concern himself so much with the logicist thesis? In his Foundations of Arithmetic he writes that both mathematical and philosophical reasons motivated him. The fist concerned the nature of the numbers and the second the epistemic status of the arithmetic propositions. And with respect to the second we find him arguing vigorously against the view that they are empirical generalizations and for the view that they are apriori truths. John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant are for him the respective representatives of those two views. Their names refer us, in turn, to an ongoing struggle in Frege’s time between an influential empiricist naturalism on the one hand and a reviving Kantianism on the other. The urgency of logicism for Frege derived precisely from this historical constellation. That is, however, something with which Weiner doesn’t concern herself. Similarly, she does not try to explain to us the conditions for the rise of the Standard Interpretation. She does seek to explain in the last two chapters of her book what her own interpretation of Frege can do for us.

 

 

NOTES

 

[1] Gottlob Frege, Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, p. 92. It is unclear from the formulation whether Husserl agreed with that judgment or was only reporting a widely held opinion.

[2] In light of the fact that Frege may have been instrumental in Husserl’s turning away from his early, psychologistic view of arithmetic, we may want to add that Frege contributed also to the decline of psychologism and the rise of the phenomenological movement in philosophy.

[3] Hans Sluga, „Wie Frege zu Sinn und Bedeutung kam,“ in Frege: Freund(e) und Feind(e), Proceedings of the  Gottlob Frege Conference 2013, Logos Verlag, Berlin 2015, pp. 14-23.

[4] Hans Sluga, Gottlob Frege, Routledge, London 1980, pp. 149-157.  See also Sluga, „Frege on Meaning,” Ratio, vol. 9, 1996, pp. 218-223, and most recently and most succinctly in „Wie Frege zu Sinn und Bedeutung kam,“ loc. cit.

David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick. The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, Princeton Univerity Press 2020, xiv + 313 pp, $ 27.95.

It was the morning of June 22, 1936. Shortly after 9 am Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, was on the way to his lecture when one of his former students intercepted him on the university staircase. “Now, you damned bastard, there you have it,” the man was heard shouting as he unloaded a pistol into his victim. Schlick was instantly dead. The student, Nelböck by name, remained on the scene, waiting to be arrested. When he was questioned, he gave a variety of confused reasons for his attack. It became quickly clear that he was mentally unstable.  At his trial, Nelböck settled on saying that Schlick’s anti-metaphysical philosophy had undermined him morally. Two years later, after Hitler had marched into Austria, he changed his story and declared that he had acted on the conviction that Schlick was Jewish. He was duly released by the new Nazi authorities and he eventually died twenty years later, still a free man, in post-Second-World-War Austria.

After the murder, Austria’s increasingly strident right-wing press found all kinds of justifications for Nelböck’s deed. Schlick’s philosophy had been damaging “the fine porcelain of the national character” according to one newspaper. Others wrote that the professor had perhaps not been Jewish (he was so neither by religious affiliation nor by family background), but he had promoted a Jewish kind of thinking: anti-metaphysical, anti-religious, and given to “logicality, mathematicality, formalism, and positivism” whereas philosophical chairs in “Christian-German Austria should be held by Christian philosophers.”

David Edmonds puts the harrowing story of Schlick’s murder into the broader context of the emergence of a new kind of philosophy that had been gestating in Vienna since the first decade of the century. It had all begun with a group of young mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who had met for informal discussions in a Vienna coffeehouse. Later, the group had become consolidated under the leadership of Schlick, a German philosopher known for his book on Einstein’s theory of relativity, who had arrived in Vienna in 1922.  The group now held regular meetings to which not everybody was invited. It began to call itself “The Vienna Circle,” proclaimed its scientific world-view in a 1929 Manifesto, published a journal, organized international conferences, and planned for a multi-volume Encyclopedia of Unified Science.  Its declared heroes were Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself a native of Vienna and the author of the stunning Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus that had been published in 1921. His book came soon to be a center piece for discussion at meetings of the group. Schlick himself and his assistant Friedrich Waismann succumbed most strongly to its beguiling influence. “What would Wittgenstein say?” became Schlick’s standard question when discussions ran into the ground.  Not that the members of the Circle agreed on a single philosophy. Otto Neurath, Schlick’s voluble counterpart in the Circle, was prone to dismiss Wittgenstein’s pronouncements as badly “metaphysical.”  The members of the Circle were united most by their desire to break with old ways of doing philosophy that still flourished at the university of Vienna and elsewhere. Their slogan was that they rejected metaphysics in whatever for it might come; their commitment was to take the empirical sciences seriously and to use the new, mathematized logic that Russell and Gottlob Frege before him had developed as an alternative to the old-fashioned Aristotelian syllogistic still being taught in philosophy departments.

The members of the Vienna Circle were not the only ones looking for new ways to do philosophy. There were also, for instance, Hans Reichenbach and Carl Gustav Hempel in Berlin with their Society for Empirical Philosophy. Others were looking for a renewal in other directions. Edmund Husserl at Freiburg sought a phenomenological way back “to the things themselves” from abstract philosophical theorizing. His way of doing philosophy spawned, in turn, Heidegger’s existential ontology with its distinctively anthropological dimension. During the same period, Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt were seeking to recast philosophy in the form of a critical social theory. At Cambridge, Wittgenstein was abandoning the assumptions of his Tractatus. Philosophical problems were now to be treated by attending to the features of ordinary language. And in this he was followed by a generation of younger Oxford philosophers. After 1945, Sartre’s existentialism took off from Paris along yet another trajectory and in reaction to it there arose eventually a whole line of ever more radical challenges to the tradition, from Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy of knowledge, to postmodernism and Derrida’s deconstruction. All of those thinkers and movements were set on redefining philosophy, what it was, how it should be conducted, on what sources it was to draw, what domains of knowledge or of human experience it should build on. And they fought bitter battles over these questions. The members of the Vienna Circle gleefully denounced Heidegger’s “metaphysical nonsense.” Heidegger, in turn, laughed off Sartre’s existentialism. Russell complained that the later Wittgenstein and his followers had given up on serious thinking. Foucault and Derrida poked each other with their verbal stilettos. The panoramic story of this great revolt against the tradition is still to be told. What set it off? Why did it take such different forms? We are still far from a full account of this multi-fronted rupture of the tradition. We don’t even know yet whether it has run its course.

The new movements in philosophy did certainly not emerge organically from the tradition. That is, presumably, one reason why the traditionalists proved so hostile to the upstarts. Outside forces were pushing the subject in new and unexpected directions. While the Circle’s Manifesto listed a long line of philosophical forerunners, its way of thinking was the product, rather, of the explosive growth of the sciences (the hard sciences like physics, first of all, but also of newer ones like psychology and sociology), of changes in the prevailing social values, and shifts in the institutional environment in which philosophy operated.  New developments in physics and the other empirical sciences were stripping philosophy of some of its old problems. (Could it really tell us something about the causal, spacio-temporal structure of the universe?). Its way of dealing with those problems came to be dismissed now as “metaphysical.” New  problems concerning the meaning of the scientific theories and their epistemic status were, instead, coming into view. Mathematics had been undergoing its own revolution since Gauss, turning more abstract and formalized in the process. This induced the mathematicians in the Circle to turn to Frege’s and Russell’s new logic. Meanwhile social changes encouraged more sober, “utilitarian” forms of thinking and with that a devaluation of “belief” of the religious kind and of the “speculative” forms of thinking practiced by the traditional philosophers. The encasing of philosophy in the university and the appearance of a welter of new academic disciplines, were undermining its customary self-understanding as the ultimate, foundational science. Philosophy, it seemed obvious to the member of the Vienna Circle, was being pushed off its old pedestal.

To find a new way of doing philosophy became thus their prime objective. But they came to project in different ways. While many of them were born in Vienna, others came from Bohemia, Hungary, and Germany and later on there would be visitors from England and the United States, from Poland and from as far away as China. Two of its most influential members (Schlick and Rudolf Carnap) were Germans. A substantial number were Jewish – at least by family background – but Schlick and Carnap were, once again, not. Most of them veered to the political left (Otto Neurath, above all, as well as Carnap) but others were neutral. They came also from different disciplines (physics and mathematics but also biology, medicine, economics, and jurisprudence) and thus different perspectives into their discussions. What they shared was an attitude, an ethos, a commitment to science, to critical argument, to reason, to the pursuit of truth. They represented, in other words, a new, up-dated Enlightenment.

If this was one thing that distinguished them from others who were looking for a philosophical renewal, the second was that they engaged in their project as a group, reading, discussing, arguing with each other, seeking to refine their ideas in interaction with each other. Since the beginning of the modern period philosophers have pursued their calling for the most part individually, each seeking to develop their own distinctive way of thinking. This is how it has been with Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz and others. With Kant, the creative philosophers had begun to work within the framework of the university. Even so they continued to develop their philosophies largely on their own. That pronounced individualism is, indeed, still alive in philosophy today. The Vienna Circle represented a very different way of doing philosophy. It pursued a collaborative form of philosophizing, reaching out to each other in pursuit of what they called “the unity of science.”

There is yet another thing that set the Vienna Circle apart. Unlike the other movements that aimed at a reformulation of the task of philosophy, the members of the Circle were keen to disseminate their thinking not only into the academy but also beyond it and beyond even the educated elite. In its Manifesto the Circle declared it one of its goals “to fashion intellectual tools for the everyday life of the scholar but also for the daily life of all those who in some way join in working at the conscious re-shaping of life.” Given the political leanings of its membership, it came natural to them to engage in leftist causes. Neurath, half a Marxist and half a Benthamite utilitarian and the most politically engaged in the Circle, sought to pursue the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people by socialist means. Austria’s Social Democratic Party was their natural home. The Circle also associated itself with the Ernst-Mach-Society founded in Vienna in 1927. Named after the philosopher-physicist the Mach Society was dedicated to spreading the new insights of the natural sciences into all social groups. Members of the Vienna the Circle soon began to dominate the Mach Society and provided much of its programming. They also served as lecturers in Vienna’s adult education program which addressed itself primarily to a working-class constituency. That kind of teaching also provided them with an income since university positions were almost impossible to obtain for the Jewish members of the Circle.  All this activism did not mean, however, that the Vienna Circle itself was a political forum. Its internal discussions were limited strictly to scientific and philosophical matters. Schlick, in particular, strongly insisted on the separation of philosophy and politics. Their empiricism made them, in any case, antipathic to doctrinaire forms of politics. But the links between their philosophical and their political commitments were nevertheless strong and visible enough to make the Vienna Circle a target for the rising forces of Austrofascism in the 1920s and of Nazism in the 1930s.

Edmonds places his account of the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle into this historical context. His book provides in this way a valuable contribution to social history as well as to the history of  a philosophical movement.  He tells his story persuasively by focusing on individual personalities in and around the Circle.  His goal is thus not give a detailed exposition of the ideas and problems that motivated their discussion. But he tells us just enough about those idea and problems to keep the story together.  More would have produced a less readable and less useful book to the general reader. Edmond’s account of the members of the Circle ranges from the patrician Moritz Schlick, an accomplished philosopher who had come to Vienna with a recommendation from Einstein, to the oversized figure of Otto Neurath, loud, boisterous, full of irrepressible energy, a political agitator and born organizer. Another central figure was the kindly, scholarly, somewhat austere Rudolf Carnap who had been one of Frege’s students and maintained close links with Russell in the Circle. Other members were typically introverted academics; others had careers in business and law that kept them somewhat apart fro the others. Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, managed to attend the meetings without ever saying anything and then stunned the group (and the mathematical world) with his incompleteness results.

The two most remarkable figures associated with the Circle were, however, not members of it. One was Ludwig Wittgenstein and the other Karl Popper, both powerful and disturbing personalities. Wittgenstein had been living in Austria during the 1920s and he returned frequently enough from Cambridge in the years after that. But all attempts to bring him to the meetings of the Circle failed. He finally agreed only to meet a select few in Schlick’s house or on his own ground. Later, in 1938, when the members of the Vienna Circle were congregating at Cambridge for their fourth Unity of Science Congress, Wittgenstein was seen demonstratively leaving the town. In contrast to Wittgenstein, Popper was never invited into the Circle and he began to consider himself the group’s appointed opposition. His interests certainly overlapped with theirs. Like them, he was interested in the physical sciences and in the question of the relation between theory and observation. He also saw his work as close to that of Alfred Tarski, the Polish logician, who came frequently to attend Circle meetings. But his abrasive and self-aggrandizing personality kept the two sides apart.  In retrospect we see, however, that those two outsiders actually produced work that had the widest philosophical impact. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations and Poppers Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies became classics of 20^th century philosophy. The writings of the members of the Vienna Circle, on the other hand, are read today only by specialists. Schlick’s and Neurath’s publications are barely remembered and Carnap’s have proved too technical to attract wide attention.

The murder of Schlick occupies just one chapter in Edmonds’ narrative. But he treats it as a pivotal moment in the history of the Vienna Circle. In the years heading up to that moment, the Circle had grown and flourished but it had also become the target of right-wing agitators. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, the ever more tenuous political situation in Austria, and the increasingly vociferous attacks on the Circle was already making evident that the future of the Vienna Circle might be uncertain. Schlick’s murder had thus a devastating effect.  In 1937, Waismann left for the UK, the physicist Philipp Frank, one of the senior members of the Circle, went to Harvard, the mathematician Karl Menger to Notre Dame University in the US, and Karl Popper took a job in New Zealand. Most of the others were to follow soon. By good luck all of them survived. But none of them ever went back to live in Vienna after 1945. Many of them never even visited their old haunts. The loss, they felt, was too great. The magic that had created the Circle and so much else of Vienna’s cultural life was gone.

During its life, the Vienna Circle attracted many philosophical visitors from abroad. Among those who came was a 23-year-old Englishman, A. J. Ayer, who afterwards condensed what he had learned in the months he had spent attending the Circle into a brashly provocative book entitled Language, Truth, and Logic. It was the first work to acquaint English-speaking readers with the outlook of the logical empiricists. In later years, after he had recanted his attachment to the ideas of the Vienna Circle, Ayer said with cruel wit that its greatest defect was that nearly all of what it believed had proved false. But he added at once that Circle’s way of thinking had nevertheless been “true in spirit.” Contemporary philosophers do, indeed, not worry much any longer about “the verification principle” that had occupied the Vienna Circle so intensively or many of other issues that kept its discussions going. But when we look closely, we can see that the Vienna Circle has still made a permanent contribution to the way philosophy is now being done. The contest between the various schools and movements seeking to renew philosophy has, of course, not been resolved. They go on living side by side, only occasionally making contact but more usually at growling distance from each other. Traditional ways of doing philosophy are also persisting. Still, the Circle lives on today in some strands of that motley we call “analytic philosophy.” There is a new respect for the empirical sciences in almost all philosophy. Modern, mathematical logic has become a standard part of the syllabus. Philosophers speak more with each other. None of this might have happened without the efforts of the Vienna Circle. What has disappeared, however, is their exciting sense that philosophy is embarking on a new path. We are no longer living in a revolutionary age of philosophy. Analytic philosophy insofar as it is an heir of the Vienna Circle has become a professional, disciplinary, and often self-contained enterprise. It has little ambition to change its surrounding society. Immanuel Kant, who was one of the thinkers the Vienna Circle most sought to oppose, has been anointed a forerunner of the analytic tradition. The Vienna Circle is history; all of its members are gone. The one to live longest was Karl Popper who died in 1994 after a long career at the London School of Economics. There he had ruled like a king, always alert to anyone seeking to challenge him. Attending his seminars in the 1960s. I don’t recall that he ever mentioned the Vienna Circle.

Edmonds tells his story in vivid terms. Like his earlier bestselling Wittgenstein’s Poker his book is meant for a broadly educated public with a taste for philosophy but for personalities and social environments. His story of the rise and fall of the Circle is at the same time one of the rise and fall of Vienna as a vibrant center of creative and intellectual life. Since so many members of the Circle had Jewish roots, it is a story also of the destruction of a unique moment in Jewish and European culture. Hitler and his Austrian allies destroyed It all: the Vienna Circle, Vienna as a cultural capital, and that miraculous union of Jewish Viennese sensibility.  Vienna would eventually regain its wealth, but never its energies, Edmonds writes in a voice of regret. He himself, it turns out, has roots in the Vienna that is gone. “My family like many in the Circle was middle class, assimilated Jewish,” he writes, “and, like many in the Circle, blind for the extreme turn that politics would take.”