XXXV, 1, 2025: Rethinking the History of the Vienna Circle. Edited by Massimo Ferrari

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The Vienna Circle represented a crossroads of extraordinary importance for twentieth-century philosophy and played a decisive role in establishing analytical philosophy as one of the dominant currents of contemporary thought. Yet for a long time the history of the Vienna Circle remained little known, or even largely ignored. Reconstructing its origins and investigating its historical and philosophical context is precisely what recent historiography has set out to accomplish, in an increasingly extensive, rigorous, and well-documented manner. This has allowed us to move beyond the schematic picture that dominated until the 1980s and to focus instead on a much more complex image of the Circle. Thanks to the work of scholars such as Friedrich Stadler, Thomas Uebel, Michael Friedman, Alberto Coffa, Elisabeth Nemeth, Matthias Neuber, Cristian Damböck, and Andreas Vrahimis (to name only a few), the Vienna Circle now appears as a broad ‘thought collective’ in which different intellectual trajectories converged and coexisted—not without tensions. A concise and effective summary can be found in K. Sigmund’s book Sie nannten sich Der Wiener Kreis. Exaktes Denken am Rand des Untergangs (Springer, Wiesbaden, 2018). The traditional image of the Vienna Circle as the stronghold of anti-metaphysics, verificationism, the rejection of Kant in favor of Russell’s new logic, and the linguistic turn imposed by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has undergone a profound revision. Stadler’s Studien zum Wiener Kreis. Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des Logischen Empirismus im Kontext (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1997), published nearly thirty years ago, was an initial milestone in this process. At the same time, the historical and political context—the context of “Red Vienna”—has proved essential for understanding the roots of the “scientific conception of the world,” with its cultural and ideological aspirations that did not confine it (as the 1929 manifesto famously states) “to the icy slopes of logic.” Equally significant has been the detailed investigation of the Circle’s relations with early twentieth-century German philosophy—especially in the cases of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap—which has shown the importance of neo-Kantian and, in Carnap’s case, phenomenological roots. The rediscovery of Otto Neurath’s long-neglected contributions has also been crucial, making it possible to trace elements of naturalized epistemology—usually regarded as a result of Quine’s critique of logical empiricism—back to Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s (for an early and still valuable documentation, see Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle, ed. Th.E. Uebel, Kluwer, Dordrecht-Boston-London, 1991). Wittgenstein’s influence on the Vienna Circle, moreover, has been reconstructed in a more nuanced way, with recent studies partly downplaying the role of the Tractatus in the “turn in philosophy” proclaimed by Schlick in 1930. Among the most significant results of these investigations, one should mention Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. 100 Years After the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, ed. F. Stadler (Springer, Cham, 2023). In short, the history of the group of scholars who gathered around Schlick beginning in 1924 at Boltzmanngasse 5 to read and discuss Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has been revisited and, in part, rewritten—moving beyond the “dogmas” of the received view.
Many aspects, however, remain to be explored, and recent research has continued along this path with innovative results. Of particular importance is the ongoing critical edition of Schlick’s works, launched in 2006 (https://www.iph.uni-rostock.de/forschung/moritz-schlick-forschungsstelle/edition/), which makes all of Schlick’s writings—including his Nachlass—available in philologically reliable editions accompanied by a critical apparatus that sheds light on the intellectual biography of the “noble father” of the Vienna Circle. Equally valuable is the access to vast amounts of unpublished material: the correspondence of Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath, as well as the very recent publication of Carnap’s Tagebücher (ed. Ch. Damböck, 2 vols., Meiner, Hamburg, 2022), which allow us to follow almost in “real time” what took place in the Circle’s meetings and debates, up until the dramatic emigration to the United States in the second half of the 1930s. While a full account of this literature must be given elsewhere, the very need for constant updating testifies to the vitality of current research and to the innovative perspectives it continues to open on a fascinating chapter of intellectual history.
It is precisely in this direction that the present issue of Discipline Filosofiche seeks to make a further contribution to the study of the Vienna Circle. The spectrum of issues under historiographical investigation and conceptual reconstruction has broadened considerably in recent years. While canonical topics such as the protocol-sentence debate and the encyclopaedia of unified science have long been thoroughly examined, other crucial aspects once neglected have emerged in a new light. Ethical questions in Schlick and Carnap have been rediscovered; the role of social sciences, economics, psychology, and biology in the Viennese debates has gained increasing recognition; Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World has been traced back not only to Russell’s logic and neo-Kantianism but also to Dilthey, Lebensphilosophie, and the cultural modernism of Weimar. This opens the way to re-reading one of the great works of twentieth-century philosophy from a profoundly different perspective. More generally, research on logical empiricism—embracing but also extending beyond Vienna—has advanced impressively in recent years, both quantitatively and qualitatively (see The Routledge Handbook of Logical Empiricism, eds. Th. Uebel and Ch. Limbeck-Lilienau, Routledge, London-New York, 2022; and Ways of the Scientific World-Conception. Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath, eds. Ch. Damböck, J. Friedl, U. Höfer, Brill, Leiden-Boston, 2024). Shedding light on the “aftermath”—the period following the dissolution of the Circle after Schlick’s assassination in June 1936 (a watershed event recently reconstructed by D. Edmonds in The Murder of Professor Schlick. The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, Princeton University Press, Princeton-Oxford, 2020) and Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938—allows us to place the history of “scientific philosophy” in a long-term perspective. This includes its transplantation to the United States, its encounters with American pragmatism and the Frankfurt School in exile, and the testimonies left by exiles from Nazi Austria in memoirs and autobiographical writings (notably Hilde Spiel and Jean Améry).
Readers of the essays collected here will see how these themes are explored by Italian and international scholars whose authority and expertise make it possible to reconstruct, in a precise, well-documented, and conceptually rigorous manner, “what the Vienna Circle really was”: both in its origins, which in some respects predate the Great War (as Neurath himself emphasized), and in its subsequent development up to the Second World War. These are necessarily plural perspectives, from which no organic reconstruction or exhaustive overview can be expected. Much remains to be investigated, but this collection nonetheless provides an important opportunity to revisit a crucial chapter in the “chronicles of philosophy” of the twentieth century. In Italy, where critical literature on the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism is less abundant than elsewhere—not only in the English- and German-speaking worlds but also, more recently, in France—there has long been a need for such an update. In keeping with its tradition, Discipline Filosofiche once again takes on the task of internationalising research, entering actively into the network of scholars and scientific communities that are currently experiencing a particularly fruitful phase of inquiry into the Vienna Circle.

Contents
(click on the titles to view the abstracts)

Massimo Ferrari, Premessa
Otto Neurath, I viandanti smarriti di Cartesio e il motivo ausiliare (a cura di Massimo Ferrari)
Ádám Tamas Tuboly, Between Science and Fringe. The Vienna Circle on Pseudoscience
Andreas Vrahimis, Metaphysics, Biology, and Scientific Philosophy. Schlick’s Lectures on Bergson
Rudolf Meer, A Forgotten Source for Moritz Schlick’s Problems of Ethics. Alois Riehl’s Determinism of the Will and Practical Freedom
Massimo Mezzanzanica, Vita, esperienza e struttura. Sul concetto di costruzione in Dilthey e Carnap
Massimo Ferrari, Leibniz e il Circolo di Vienna
Roberto Gronda, From Curiosity to Hostility. Dewey’s Confrontation with Carnap’s Philosophy
Christian Damböck, Carnap’s Explication of Ethics in Value Concepts (1958)
Friedrich Stadler, Moritz Schlick, the Vienna Circle and Austrian Literature after World War II
Thomas Uebel, Herbert Marcuse e l’immagine unidimensionale dell’empirismo logico