Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science by Karl SigmundMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Born in the tumultuous emergence of World War I and dissipated by the disruption of World War II, violence punctuates the Circle’s story. This includes physicist-cum-revolutionary Friedrich Adler’s assassination of Austrian minister-president Count Karl von Stürgkh, civil unrest even unto cremation riots, “the frantic 1920s”, and on to the cruelly ironic slaying on the Philosophers’ Staircase at the University of Vienna of Schlick by a former student. Philosophical debate mirrored these physical battles. Simplified, the eventual neopositivism of the Circle contrary to idealism rested on a central thesis of verificationism, asserting that only statements verifiable are cognitively meaningful. As the author observes in reviewing these important decades in the development of Western philosophy: “The crude ideology of the Nazis had always tended to side with the idealistic philosophers, all the way from Plato to Heidegger, and the blind obedience of Hitler’s troops could well have distant roots in Immanuel Kant’s ethics of duty.”
As an avid reader, I applaud the author for embracing the seldom-used technique of a summary epigraph per chapter. It comes across as one part of the author’s obvious enthusiasm in the Circle. Author Karl Sigmund is a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna and one of the pioneers of evolutionary game theory. As he says here, “the Vienna Circle has been with me for half a century.” This history is decades in the making and well worth the wait for anyone interested in the development of Western philosophy.
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