The “Verein Ernst Mach” - What Was It Really?

Abstract

It seemed plausible to most members of the Vienna Circle, the philosophical group most responsible for the rise of Logical Positivism, who also saw themselves as representatives of a scientific movement with tendencies based on the Enlightenment, to do their best to help spread and popularize the heart of their own teachings.¹ They also stood in the adult-education tradition of empirically-minded philosophers and scientists of the recently dismembered Austro-Hungarian Monarchy such as Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Friedrich Jodl, Wilhelm Jerusalem, and Adolf Stöhr. The leading members of the Vienna Circle decided during the l920’s in a manner consistent with this earlier tradition and their own clear intentions to begin institutionalizing the adult-education half of their movement, bring more popular attention to their version of philosophical positivism, especially to its recent enrichment by Mach, Wittgenstein, and Russell.

This paper has been shortened, translated, and partly re-written by the editor in order to be more easily understandable to an English-speaking audience. It originally appeared as “Popularisierungsbestrebungen im Wiener Kreis und ‘Verein Ernst Mach’” which appeared in the book Philosophie, Wissenschaft, Aufklärung - Beiträge zur Geschichte und Wirk-ung des Wiener Kreises, Ed. Hans-Joachim Dahms, Walter de Gruyter: Berlin & New York. For a much more extensive and detailed version see Friedrich Stadler Vom Positivismus zur ‘Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung’, Löcker Verlag: Wien, 1982.