The Vienna Circle Archive and the Literary Remains of Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath

Abstract

The literary remains of two former members of the Vienna Circle, those of Moritz Schlick and of Otto Neurath, are now preserved in Amsterdam. Schlick’s papers are almost completely preserved and cover the period from 1900 to 1936; Neurath’s papers, publications apart, cover only the period from 1934 to 1945. The two collections, which contain many documents that illuminate the Vienna Circle and the heyday of logical empiricism in the thirties, belong to the Vienna Circle Archive, which, at the time of writing (and until 1985), is housed in the Institute for Foundational Research and for the Philosophy of the Exact Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.¹ The archive also contains a collection of a large amount of other material that can be described as very important for the study of the history of the various conceptions of the philosophy of science that were entertained in the Vienna Circle. Apart from a number of valuable new acquisitions of later date,² the bulk of this material is the result of my own research activities, carried out from 1961 to 1967, though with a number of interruptions. These activities were undertaken on the suggestion of Evert Beth, then director of the institute which he founded in 1952. It is thus also thanks to him, rather than to me, that there exists a Vienna Circle Archive in Amsterdam.