The study of logical empiricism is now having another peak after its initial phase during the 1980s and 90s, when the works of Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Moritz Schlick were revisited under new historical lights. During the last decade, however, the Vienna Circle has also been reinterpreted through social and political lenses. It should hardly surprise anyone that the most socially engaged figure in the movement was the Austrian polymath Otto Neurath (1882–1945) who not only took broad political and public positions in the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic and later in Red Vienna but also developed a socially binding naturalistic philosophy of science. Yet what politics and socio-cultural engagement meant for him—and for the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism more generally—remain a question still to be scrutinized by philosophers and historians.
In the 1930s, the Vienna Circle was a radical movement that enthusiastically engaged in intellectual and institutional battles at all levels. They challenged religious philosophers and scientists, fought nationalists and conservatives, combated metaphysicians and moralists, confronted capitalists and oppressive powers, and struggled with university professors and authorities. Their famous 1929 manifesto was a call-to-arms, with countless exclaims, warnings, and shout outs to “all friends of the scientific world-conception.”
By correlating epistemic and social values, Neurath was radical in drawing the boundaries of investigations. In his famous “Protocol Statements” paper, for example, he warned that fellow-positivist Carnap’s phenomenalism “might induce younger people to search for this protocol language”, which in turn “easily leads to metaphysical digressions.” Thus “for the sake of vacillators,” one should avoid pursuing or investigating phenomenal languages, an instead they shall press physicalism “in its most radical version.” The same verdict applied to parapsychology: although some members of the Vienna Circle—notably Carnap and Hans Hahn—skeptically investigated supposed para-phenomena, Neurath not only ridiculed their efforts, but even bullied Hahn and pointed out the dangers of engaging such pseudoscientists.
Not long after Hahn’s death, when the first pre-conference of the unified science movement was launched in Prague in 1934, Philipp Frank described the Vienna Circle as “the shock troop [Stoßtrupp] of the anti-metaphysical and steadily scientifically minded research movement.” The Stoßtrupp had been the elite unit of the Imperial German Army in World War I, specialized in raids, quick maneuvers, and infiltration. By 1934, however, it was better known as Hitler’s first bodyguard unit, the forerunner of the SS. Frank was surely exaggerating, but he had a point: the Vienna Circle was indeed an elite group, specialized to wipe out metaphysical nonsense from science, philosophy, and the public discourse—without much concern about collateral damage.
That same year, Neurath was forced to flee to The Hague after the Fascist takeover of Austria. There he began to organize the next, genuinely international phase of logical empiricism through the International Congress for the Unity of Science and International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. In the coming years, most logical empiricists went into exile from continental Europe, mainly to the United Kingdom and the United States. Despite regular invitations, Neurath saw the importance of remaining permanently in Europe to maintain the scientific spirit, and thus he stayed in The Hague until the German invasion of May 1940. Then, on a small boat—watching Rotterdam burn while navigating through a minefield in the dark with a couple of others—Neurath and his partner, Marie Reidemeister, fled as well. They were picked up by a British ship and were instantly taken into separate internment camps for enemy aliens on the Isle of Man, a thriving tourist destination.
Despite the shortage of food, clothing, and freedom, during the long eight months he spent in old guest houses fenced in with barbed wire, Neurath managed to build up a new network, lecture on sociology and philosophy, conduct cultural and artistic performances, and become better acquainted with the British way of life—something he typically described as “muddled.” In a letter to Edgar Kaufmann, a philanthropist department store owner in Pittsburgh, U.S.A., he wrote in his characteristic tone of happiness and optimism that he had always wished to see the Irish sea, and now “the King paid all the expenses.” With fresh air, books, an improvised university, and a small cinema, his internment camp was a “paradise”, especially compared to a Russian camp, as he wrote to his friend Elsa Brändström, a Swedish nurse who had visited German and Austrian prisoners of war in Russia during and in the wake of First World War.
After the British philosopher and logician L. Susan Stebbing arranged an attorney for Neurath, and after Albert Einstein provided a written testimony to his personal and scientific integrity, he was released on February 7, 1941—Marie a day earlier. The very next day, as he set foot in Oxford, Neurath began working energetically on rebuilding their Isotype Institute (established shortly thereafter with Stebbing as chair of the board) and on re-establishing his international scientific network with American colleagues. He even gave an invited course on “Logical Empiricism and the Social Sciences” at Oxford’s All Souls College, arranged by the social anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radfcliffe-Brown.
In the previous decade it was first Moritz Schlick (in 1932), and Rudolf Carnap (in 1934) who introduced a not-so-Neurathian version of logical empiricism to the British audiences, and a bit later (in 1935) Carl Gustav Hempel gave a talk on the present state of the movement at Stebbing’s home. Although Neurath had lectured in a few British towns about visual education as early as 1933, it was finally his chance to present the ideas of logical empiricism firsthand in March 1941. Besides discussing some general ideas about unified science, the critique of metaphysics, and the movement’s British predecessors, Neurath’s version of logical empiricism must have appeared as a radically new invention to his audience. He described the movement as a group of scholars working on scientific and everyday statements, accepting both in order to prepare a balanced approach. Their frameworks were “ways of speaking” in a multiplicity of languages because “language is defined as communication between human beings at a certain period.” Logical empiricism, he argued, was a movement, whose scientific work consisted in evaluating, refining, and planning “proposals” and new conventions. In that work they were “pleased to find people who are prepared to play on the same platform of communication.”
Although one can certainly find traces of this rather relaxed, interpretative, and pluralistic conception in the earlier continental phase of logical empiricism, it must have been new to those trained on texts such as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language,” or “Philosophy and Logical Syntax.” The radical, politically engaged (late-)Enlightenment movement of Red Vienna was transformed in Neurath’s hands into a democratic, scholarly grouping of interested collaborators. As he wrote to Karl Mannheim (whom he had sharply criticized as a “bourgeois Marxist” in the early 1930s but sought to cooperate with in the 1940s): “I think it is important that we try to be as co-operative as possible, when promoting democracy. That is just the point, to co-operate as much as possible, that does not imply, that one reduces difference in opinion.”
When Neurath passed away in December of 1945, Carnap and others believed that he had a difficult time in Britain, especially compared to his much more successful years in Vienna. But that was not the case. According to Marie Neurath (whom Otto married in February 1941 soon after their release), these were Otto’s “most successful” years, and “he stressed again and again, how much he felt at home” in Britain. Neurath “had very good friends here, and an extraordinary response.”
This presents an intriguing puzzle in intellectual history and the history of philosophy. In Otto Neurath in Britain (2025), which I co-authored with Christopher Burke, we tried to unravel this puzzle by taking a closer look—drawing from our personal expertise in philosophy and visual education—at how Neurath ended up in Britain, what social and scholarly forces secured his release from internment, how he rebuilt his scientific network so quickly and effectively among exiles and British scholars, and finally, how his emigration did reshape the way logical empiricism was conceived and planned in a new cultural and political atmosphere.
During those years, Neurath published numerous short papers with Joseph A. Lauwerys—a prominent educationalist—on the influence of Plato and Platonism on German culture, education, and scientific thinking. They accused Plato of defending and propagating oppressive, dogmatist, authoritative, and anti-democratic views in The Republic that created the cultural conditions (a special “atmosphere” or “climate” as Neurath called it) for Nazism to spread with unprecedented speed and little resistance. Neurath and Lauwerys provoked one of the most intense public controversies in wartime Britain. Numerous leading educationalists and historians entered the debate against them, uncritically defending Plato’s authority and essential insights “floating down the ages,” as P. H. C. Prentice put it. For Neurath, however, initiating a critical discussion about the conceptual and intellectual origins of Nazism and Fascism was a democratic duty, necessary to form a more nuanced understanding and ultimately to develop better strategies for Germany’s post-war reeducation. Direct and confrontational arguments would not work, Neurath argued, because they would only backfire among people with well-established traditional views. One must instead change the atmosphere—the culture and the people’s habitual preparedness to react and response in a certain way in every situation. Only one scholar came to Neurath and Lauwerys’s defense, endorsing the insights and arguments: Bertrand Russell, who offered his The History of Western Philosophy as an elucidation of the problem.
Yet, Neurath’s logical empiricism was unable to flourish in a British academic landscape, dominated by A.J. Ayer and other traditional philosophers. From a practical point of view, Isotype spread throughout country, and Marie was able to launch such book series (based on Neurath’s ideas) that influenced generations of children and interested laypeople.
Logical empiricists frequently revised their theses and arguments, and in doing so, logical empiricism changed its public face. As it turns out, Neurath was a leading figure in the dissemination and reshaping of logical empiricism in the new context of wartime Britain. As the “social history of analytic philosophy” is just becoming fashionable thanks to the efforts of Christoph Schuringa, it is worth studying those general social conditions and contexts that shaped, framed, oriented, and nourished philosophical ideas and their reception in different times and places.
[All page references are to Otto Neurath in Britain.]
Adam Tamas Tuboly
Adam Tamas Tuboly is a Hungarian philosopher and historian of philosophy, primarily interested in twentieth century philosophy of science and the philosophy and demarcation of pseudosciences. He is leading the MTA Lendület Values and Science Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and is a senior research fellow at the Department of Behavioural Sciences at the Medical School of the University of Pécs.
