Abstract
It is highly problematical to speak of the ‘philosopher’ Otto Neurath, because he was a declared enemy not only of idealistic metaphysics, but of all philosophy. This renouncement of philosophy came easy to Neurath—he did not have to defend an academic position. What in his writings is called the scientific world-conception, physicalism, unified science, logical empiricism, encyclopedism, was not conceived as philosophy, as super-science with a specific method, or as the clarification of sentences by explicatory pseudo-sentences (as by Wittgenstein and Schlick), but as an undertaking within the sciences, as their unification and encyclopedic integration.
Notes
First published as ‘Der Philosoph Otto Neurath’, in Arbeiterbildung in der Zwischenkenkriegszeit, Hrsg. F. Stadler, © 1982, Österreichisches Gesellschafts- und Wirtchaftsnudeum, Wien, pp. 70–78. Translate with kind permission of Österreichisches- und Wirtchaftsnudeum and the author by T. E. Uebel.
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Notes
First published as *Der Philosoph Otto Neurath’, in Arbeiterbildung in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Hrsg. F. Stadler, © 1982, Österreichisches Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, Wien, pp. 70–78. Translated with kind permission of Österreichisches Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum and the author by T. E. Uebel.
On Schlick, Neurath and the other personalities of the Vienna Circle, see also the conversation Rudolf Haller and I had with Heinrich Neider (Haller & Rutte 1977).
Support for the following summary portrait can be found in Neurath 1981, passim; cf. Haller & Rutte 1981.
See Popper’s memories in Neurath 1973, p. 55; cf. Carnap 1963a.
E.g. Quine 1960 and 1969. It is particularly Neurath’s famous simile of the sailors which has always inspired Quine. “We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.” (Neurath 1932d, p. 92.) The parable can already be found in Neurath’s Anti-Spengler: “We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh at the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, by using the old beams and driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.” Prior to this Neurath remarks (in the sense of Duhem) “that every statement about any happening is saturated with hypotheses of all sorts and that these in the end are derived from our whole world-view.” (Neurath 1921a, p. 199.)
The affinity between Neurath and Kuhn was pointed out previously by R. Hegselmann 1979a, pp. 44f.
Feyerabend 1978. [Translator’s note: This phrasing in fn. 48 in the German edition of Science in a Free Society-Erkenntnis fiir freie Menschen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1979-differs in the addition of the second sentence in place of the parenthetical “as opposed to philosophical analysis” in fn. 11 in the reprint in Philosophical Papers vol. 2.]
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Rutte, H. (1991). The Philosopher Otto Neurath. In: Uebel, T.E. (eds) Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3182-7_6
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