The Vienna Circle is now best remembered for its illustrious tangent, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In its prime, between the wars, the unofficial fraternity was presided over by Moritz Schlick, who began his academic career as a physicist. Inspired by Ernst Mach, Schlick and his associates presumed science to be a “social practice,” devoted to the solution of “usually practical” problems. Philosophy, traditionally crowned “the Queen of Sciences,” was dethroned, as Europe’s pre-war emperors had been in 1918, and relegated to dusting and polishing propositional paraphernalia. The fraternity soon to be known as “Logical Positivists”—Rudolf Carnap the most rigorous; the elephantine trumpeter Otto Neurath the loudest—regarded metaphysics as the “beguiling nonsense” of what A. J. “Freddie” Ayer came to stigmatize as “pundits.”
Ethics and aesthetics were banished from the common ground of science and left for private cultivation. Radical disinterestedness distinguished the Circle from those denounced by Julien Benda in 1927’s La Trahison des Clercs: intellectual opportunists who cut their cloth to suit ideological patrons. In the same year, Martin Heidegger published Being and Time. Within a decade, he became the timeliest of treasonous clerks by coming out for National Socialism. Not one of the Vienna Circle proved an accessory to genocide. It is a contingent irony that Moritz Schlick was murdered, in 1936, by a jealous student, pumped up with the lethal air du temps.
David Edmonds begins his magisterial conspectus, The Murder of Professor Schlick, with an emblematic vignette. Having marked that in
