The Vienna circle in France (1935–1937)

Antonia Soulez

pp. 95-112

in: Friedrich Stadler (ed), Scientific philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

In 1980, Pierre Jacob¹ published a book about the itinerary of logical positivism from Vienna to Cambridge (Mass.), a story of the migration and of the effects of logical positivism in America since the fifties. Christiane Chauviré ² took the other way round in a paper about the early influence of Peirce's pragmatism on the Vienna Circle (read in 1983, Créteil-University). We are also aware of the importance of logical positivism in England. Sir Alfred Ayer brought it back to England after having met, on Ryle's recommendation, Moritz Schlick in Vienna in 1932. Gilbert Ryle was Ayer's tutor in Oxford. The meeting between the two of them took place two years after the International Congress of Philosophy in Oxford (1930). It was on this occasion that Gilbert Ryle, who opened the congress, met Schlick for the first time. In his autobiographical sketch,³ he mentions the impact of the Viennese philosophy on his own philosophical development in the early thirties. This attests to the Vienna/Cambridge (USA and GB)/Oxford triangle.

Cited authors

Schlick Moritz

Ryle Gilbert

Jacob Pierre

Peirce Charles Sanders

Chauviré Christiane