The Vienna circle : the story of logical empiricism / Sahotra Sarkar.

"In Vienna in the early 1920s a group of brilliant philosophers, mathematicians and scientists - led by figures including Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Kurt Gödel - gathered to discuss the very foundations of science and mathematics. Known as the Vienna Circle, their motto was 'knowledge only from experience' and the movement became known as Logical Empiricism. In this highly engaging book, Sahotra Sarkar tells the philosophical story of one hundred years of Logical Empiricism, from its inception in 1924 to its legacy today. He explains how its theories, influenced by the revolutionary theories of space, time and causality in the air at the time, led to a quest for a unified theory of science. He also shows how Logical Empiricism's courageous commitment to logic and objectivity provided a powerful political antidote to Nazi racism and obscurantism, before charting the fall of the movement after many of its members, who had fled to the United States during World War Two, were presumed to have communist sympathies. A superb evocation of one of the most important intellectual and scientific movements of the twentieth century, The Vienna Circle: The Story of Logical Empiricism will be of great interest to anyone interested in philosophy, history, and the history of science"- -