December 25, 2020
EMPIRICISM IS A HOAX:
Testing positivism: a review of The Murder of Professor Schlick : The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle by David Edmonds (Clare Clark, 23 December, 2020, Standpoint)
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 (who gave his name to the speed of sound), 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". [...]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".
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 25, 2020 7:37 PM