“I appreciated Carnap's demystified form of Wittgenstein's removal of
traditional ethics from the realm of the cognitive, even though it certainly
did not come to me in any way as a revelation. I had already been convinced by
Hume and Poincare that propositions about what ought to be could not be
inferred from propositions about what is; and from this conviction, combined
with an empiricist attitude, there is only a small step to Carnap's
epistemological view of ethics. But what troubled me was the negativity of
this view. Might not exact thinking, despite everything, yield positive ideas
connected with ethical problems or at least be somehow applicable to them? I
searched the literature of ethics. After rereading Brentano's tracts
expounding 'ethical intuitionism' - only to find the empty phrases that I
remembered - I looked again into Kant's development of the categorical
imperative. The very formulation of that principle is not the same in all of
Kant's writings. He commands us to adopt maxims that can be general laws in
one of his books, and maxims that we can wish to be general laws in another.
[…] the difference just quoted - roughly comparable to that between formalism
and intuitionism in mathematics - was not clearly brought out, let alone
adequately emphasized. What troubled me even more, however, was a serious
shortcoming from a strictly pragmatic point of view of the imperative in
either form: the impossibility of ascertaining what specific actions the
imperative commanded in specific situations. For an individual cannot know
which general rules are possible nor even state which rules he finds desirable
unless he is aware of all, or at least the most important, consequences of the
general rules in question.” (Menger, 1994, p. 181f)


“While the political situation in Austria during the winter of 1933-34 made it
extremely difficult to concentrate on pure mathematics, socio-political
problems and questions of ethics imposed themselves on everyone almost
everyday.” (Menger, 1994, p. 181)


“Neurath, in 1931, turned to the integration of sociology into his unified
science. Ethics, he claimed, after the elimination of all theological and
metaphysical elements was reduced to the behavioristic study of certain modes
of human behavior and of the commands of persons to other persons. While
viewing with disfavor all studies of the motivation of individual actions,
Neurath pointed out the possibility of a felicitology in the sense of
behavioristic study of the degrees of happiness under various regulations of
life. In 1936, the year when with Schlick's death the Circle in Vienna came to
an end, Victor Kraft began writing a book Grundlagen einer wissenschaftlichen
Wertlehre (Foundations of a Scientific Theory of Value), which appeared in
1937. In it, Kraft distinguished two elements of a value judgment: the
valuation proper and the content or object of the valuation. That content may
be related to the contents of other value judgments, for example by
subsumption. Relations of this kind between the objects account for logical
relations between value judgments. In this way Kraft explained, for example,
the deducibility of one value judgment from another.” (Menger, 1994, p. 180f)


“Carnap […]. In The Logical Structure of the World he quoted with appreciation
Ostwald's derivation of values from energetics and observed that the
construction of values from certain value experiences is in many ways
analogous to the construction of physical things from perceptual experiences.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 180)


“Even in 1930, when Schlick's epistemological views were profoundly influenced
by the Tractatus and conversations with its author, he published a book,
Problems of Ethics, in which, without any mention of Wittgenstein's ideas, he
proposed to develop ethics in a strictly objective spirit. "Ethics seeks
nothing but knowledge." That search, he continued, rules out the encroachment
of wishes, hopes, and fears upon objectivity; it is incompatible with the
positing of commands as well as with an absolute justification of norms. Only
relative justifications are possible, basing rules on higher rules; but that
procedure ends in ultimate rules or in a highest norm, which cannot be
justified in the same way. In particular, Schlick criticized Kant's attempt to
base a morality of duty on an absolute, formal command, the categorical
imperative […]. he likened it to an absolute uncle without nephews and nieces.
According to Schlick, the object of ethics is rather the explanation of human
behavior - essentially a psychological task which he carried out in the spirit
of hedonism. Decisions of the individual are determined by the motive of
greatest pleasure and least pain - altruistic behavior and even sacrificial
suffering being among the possible sources of pleasure. Kant's ethic of duty
Schlick attempted to replace with the ideal that individuals should desire
what society demands - an ideal that seems to him to presuppose gradual
changes both in the attitudes of individuals and in the claims of society.
Problems of Ethics is a book breathing its author's spirit of gentleness and
kindness, while the influence of analytic thinking is merely implicit in its
avoidance of some of the worst traditional verbiage.” (Menger, 1994, p. 179)


“Except for aesthetics, ethics was the part of traditional philosophy least
discussed in the Circle.” (Menger, 1994, p. 178)


“Many scholars used the supposed insights and methods that were allegedly
unavailable to exact science for spurious derivations or justifications of
their political views, most of which happened to be extremely rightist.
Earlier in the century, such arguments had played some role in the promotion
of a fascist mentality in the higher schools of Germany and Austria. But when
Neurath tried to use the unity of science movement to brake that development,
the situation in Central Europe had gone far beyond the point of intellectual
argument.” (Menger, 1994, p. 177)


“Psychological, sociological and economical entities could be and were to be
constituted from sense-data by logical methods just like the entities of the
physical world. On the other hand, various scholars including philosophers,
sociologists, and historians, had for a long time maintained that they were in
possession of special insights into ideas and of special methods of obtaining
knowledge - insights and methods unavailable to the sciences. In German, the
polarization is expressed by the words Geisteswissenschaften versus
Naturwissenschaften (roughly, human vs. natural sciences). The oldest and most
common claim of this type, the pretension to an intuition of essences, had
been treated by Schlick as early as 1913 in an excellent paper critical of
Bergson and Husserl. "Is there intuitive knowledge"? In the period between the
two world wars, the claims became more numerous and more specific. They
included the understanding of the meaning of history, empathy into the spirit
of nations, etc. Neurath and Carnap denied the social sciences all such
privileged methods. They only granted them concepts that were in principle
obtainable by constitution in the last analysis from sense-data and
propositions that were amenable to testing by verification and confirmation
just like those of the natural sciences. They promoted the idea of a unified
science. Schlick was not as enthusiastic about the project as some members of
the Circle including Hahn, but favorably inclined. For my part, I found what
Carnap said about special cases of methodological illusion or abuse to be
fully convincing. Yet, apart from an instinctive aversion to monistic schemes
of any kind, I feared that the idea of a unified science might possibly lead
to the exclusion a priori of potentially valuable objects or methods of study.
And there was another point. Mutual delimitations of branches of science are
necessary for the organization of studies and research of schools and
libraries, and for diverse commercial purposes. Such delimitations are
historically conditioned if not altogether arbitrary. But they are of hardly
any epistemological interest. Attempts to freeze such delimitations in rigid
definitions are not only useless but likely to slow down normal development
and to inhibit progress by limiting a priori the objects and/or the methods of
research. Now the unification of science seemed to me to repeat this
objectionable procedure on a higher level. Science is being delimited - from
what? from technology? from art? It is doubtful that this can be achieved
except by arbitrary dictates; and it is even more doubtful that anything would
be gained if it could be achieved.” (Menger, 1994, p. 175f)


“In his book ‘Der logische Aufbau der Welt’, Carnap had (even before coming to
Vienna); begun to execute a program for "constituting the world out of
immediate sense-data by the methods of modern logic." Schlick and the other
members of the Circle greatly appreciated this synthesis of Mach's and
Russell's ideas; in Hahn's opinion it was the very core of logical
empiricism.” (Menger, 1994, p. 175)


“Carnap and Neurath had begun to develop their ideas on what they called
protocol sentences […]. Protocol sentences were presented as the basis of our
knowledge a claim that Schlick contested from the beginning. He called such
sentences hypothetical and subject to later revision. According to Schlick,
the bases of knowledge were what he called Konstatierungen.” (Menger, 1994, p.
174)


“When I returned to Vienna in the fall of 1931 Feigl had decided to stay on
for good in America while Carnap had left for Prague but visited the Circle
from time to time.” (Menger, 1994, p. 174)


“From Cambridge, I repeatedly visited New York City, which made an
overwhelming impression on me. On one occasion, I gave a lecture at Columbia
University. A somber one-armed man attracted my attention […]. Emil Post. […]
Early in February I arrived at the Rice Institute in Houston. I had not seen
Gödel since June, so I learned of his epoch making logical discovery from a
letter of Nöbeling while I was lecturing in Houston. I at once presented the
ideas to a greatly interested, if somewhat bewildered group at the Rice
Institute, where Charles W. Morris was then teaching as a young lecturer.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 171)


“From Cleveland, I went to Chicago, where Eliakim Hasting Moore had invited me
to spend New Year's Day 1931 with him. If there has been a father of American
mathematics, then it certainly was Moore, the teacher of Birkhoff, Oswald
Veblen, Robert Lee Moore, and most American mathematicians of their age who
later became prominent. In 1930 Moore was old and unwell. He asked me about
intuitionism, dimension theory, and metric geometry.” (Menger, 1994, p. 170)


“he said, "I have thought over what you told me; and I see a similarity
between your explications of geometric ideas and the explication of economic
ideas in the theories of value, of capital, and of money." He invited me to
attend the charter meeting of the Economic Society to be held in Cleveland in
connection with the Christmas meeting of the American Association of the
Advancement of Science, where I had been invited to speak about the axiomatics
of dimension. From there, Schumpeter returned to Germany via Japan.” (Menger,
1994, p. 170)


“In the fall of 1930, Josef Schumpeter was teaching in the Harvard Economics
Department. He was a man of great personal charm, a bit affected but very
entertaining. He is not usually mentioned in connection with philosophy. Yet
Schumpeter was, I believe, the first to introduce, as early as 1908, Machian
ideas into economic theory in his book Essence and Content of Theoretical
Economics. In particular, he asked for descriptions rather than explanations
and tried to replace cause-and-effect relations by functional connections. In
the second generation of Austrian marginalists, Schumpeter was the only one
without prejudices against mathematics. In fact, he had some knowledge of
mathematical analysis, which he was very eager to expand. For he had a strong
wish to understand and to follow the work of the young mathematical economists
whose numbers rapidly increased in the late 1920's. In 1930, Schumpeter's
mathematical knowledge was still rather primitive. But he diligently studied
differential equations - I believe from one of the French treatises - and told
me about his progress whenever we had lunch in the Harvard Club. One day, when
he had just reached the chapter on existence proofs in his treatise, he spoke
about their solution with great indignation. "In case of those differential
equations," he said, "one has even to worry whether the bitch exists (ob das
Luder existiert)." I tried to explain that such worries must not be confined
to differential equations. Any equation results from a certain statement about
a connection between some entities and numbers, and consists in the task of
'finding' some of those entities when others are 'given'; in other words, it
is the problem of expressing some of them in terms of others; and indeed of
numbers mentioned in the statement. But, in general, it is uncertain whether
the basic statement is valid for all combinations of 'given' entities and
numbers or in fact for any such combination; and if this is not the case, then
the 'bitch' does not exist. But Schumpeter did not seem to take these remarks
very seriously, not even when I mentioned, as an example, the socalled problem
of imputation (Zurechnungsproblem) of the marginalists. In contrast to the
eighteenth century economists, who taught that the value of products stems
from the value of the factors of production, the marginalists claimed that,
the value of the factors is derived from the expected value of the products.
The question arose as to how one imputes the prices of the products to the
factors. Walras had set up a system of equations for the prices and quantities
of the factors used in the production or, rather, he had set up statements
connecting the prices and quantities of the factors and of the products and
one could try to express those of the factors in terms of those of the
products, "No differential equations are involved," I said to Schumpeter, "but
are you sure that a solution exists?" Schumpeter brushed this off with the
remark that Walras' system included just as many equations as unknowns.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 168f)


“while the philosophers in the Vienna Circle aimed primarily at general
statements about procedures, Bridgman stressed particulars.” (Menger, 1994, p.
167)


“Bridgman appeared to me as a modern reincarnation of Mach. Both men were
experimentalists with an encyclopedic knowledge of the physics of their time,
who devoted a good deal of their energy to reflections about the basic
concepts and the structure of physics, realizing the importance of such
studies for physics and in fact for science in general.” (Menger, 1994, p.
167)


“The greatest impression that I received from a philosopher of science at
Harvard or, for that matter, in the United States came from Percy Bridgman.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 166)


“Other logicians and philosophers at Harvard included Alfred North Whitehead
and Willard V. O. Quine. The former, with whom I exchanged only a few words at
one of his Sunday teas, was 70 but appeared to me even older and seemed to
have lost his interest in logic. Quine, on the other hand, while obviously
destined to become an outstanding logician, was still working for his PhD.
Unfortunately I did not know that C. I. Lewis had joined the faculty that fall
and therefore made no attempt to meet him.” (Menger, 1994, p. 166)


“In 1930, Wiener was in his post-logical, pre-cybernetic period, entirely
preoccupied with mathematical analysis. Whatever mathematical problem was
being discussed and even in sundry nonmathematical discussions, Wiener would
bring up a more or less relevant Fourier integral.” (Menger, 1994, p. 163)


“I often saw Norbert Wiener, who was associated with the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and with him, too, took long Sunday hikes in the
beautiful surroundings of Cambridge.” (Menger, 1994, p. 162)


“Paul Weiss was preparing an edition of Charles Sanders Peirce's Collected
Works with Charles Hartshorne. Weiss told me a great deal about that profound
logician, who in the 1920's was not well known in Vienna, where pragmatism was
regarded as having been originated by William James, although James himself
gave the credit to Peirce. Peirce was the first to stress "the consideration
of the practical bearing that we conceive the objects of our conceptions to
have" and wrote in a frequently quoted passage that "our conception of those
effects is the whole of our concepts of the objects."” (Menger, 1994, p. 161)


“Sheffer without Russell's strong support might have lost his job.” (Menger,
1994, p. 161)


“In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein made extensive use of Sheffer's discovery
without mentioning its author. In one of our conversations, Sheffer brought up
this fact adding (not quite convincingly) that he did not resent it. In the
Preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote "... what I have written makes no
claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources ..."
"Russell in his Introduction to the Tractatus gave me full credit," Sheffer
said. Then he spoke about the importance for him of Russell's later support in
view of the speed with which gossip spreads in universities.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 160)


“Of the Harvard philosophers, the one I saw most frequently was Henry Maurice
Sheffer, a very personable and likeable man. On hikes in the beautiful
surroundings of Cambridge we had long, if inconclusive, talks about
philosophy.” (Menger, 1994, p. 159)


“I lectured on dimension theory and metric geometry at Harvard University from
September 1930 until February 1931. While I was there I also tried to learn
about philosophical studies parallel to those carried on in Vienna. However,
while I had interesting mathematical conversations, especially with George
David Birkhoff, the outstanding American mathematician, and Marston Morse, few
people seemed to know much about the Vienna Circle. This changed with the
arrival of Feigl, who began to propagate Viennese ideas and especially
Carnap's wherever he went. Birkhoff was intensely interested in aesthetics at
that time. He had just returned from a world tour and brought home interesting
phonograph records of various types of Oriental music. While the experience
certainly had not made him an aesthetic relativist, there were some
positivistic elements in his aesthetic studies. Steering clear of what he
called 'philosophical definitions' of art (such as Croce's 'the expression of
an impression') Birkhoff tested his theory of beauty. He let groups of
students rank polygonal figures according to beauty and compared the results
with the ranking according to his formula. The latter was based on the idea
that, roughly speaking, beauty increases with order and decreases with
complexity. In fact, he declared the ratio of order to complexity as the
measure of beauty without, in my opinion, sufficiently stressing the arbitrary
character of this stipulation.” (Menger, 1994, p. 158f)


“Tarski discussed truth tables and similar devices used to define the logical
particles explicitly, and systems of axioms used to introduce them
implicitly.” (Menger, 1994, p. 148)


“Tarski delivered his three lectures before the Colloquium on February 19, 20,
and 21, 1930. […] The lecture dealt with some fundamental concepts of the
methodology of the exact sciences using meaningful proposition and consequence
as undefined terms.” (Menger, 1994, p. 147)


“Lukasiewicz, extremely formal almost to the point of stiffness, was
personally the exact opposite to Lesniewski. In 1929 he was in Lwow; and I
first met him during a subsequent visit to Poland. But I learned about his
important logical achievements (some of which will be discussed in this
chapter) as soon as I came to Warsaw from Alfred Lindenbaum, Tarski, and other
young logicians. It was not only the formal logical work of the Polish
logicians, however, that impressed me. I also noted that they were interested
in philosophical problems similar to some discussed in the Vienna Circle, but
they attacked them in connection with, and partly on the basis of, their exact
logical studies. They always confined themselves to concrete questions and
completely eschewed those vague generalities which seemed to me to becloud
some of the Vienna discussions in the late 1920's. So I decided to familiarize
the Vienna Circle as well as the members of my Mathematical Colloquium with
the logicophilosophical work of the Warsaw school and invited Tarski to
deliver three lectures before the Colloquium, to two of which I planned to
invite also the entire Circle. Tarski eagerly accepted.” (Menger, 1994, p.
147)


“The first Polish logician I met, near Cracow, on my way to Warsaw was
Chwistek and we soon found points of agreement about obscurities in Husserl's
phenomenology and Weyl's utterances in support of it. Stanislaw Lesniewski,
who had been described to me as something of a Polish Wittgenstein, had just
published a very verbose account of his ideas in Fundamenta Mathematicae (v.
14). Unfortunately I barely met him. For when he saw me he exclaimed in honest
surprise "Are youngsters made professors in Vienna?"” (Menger, 1994, p. 146)


“In Germany, in the 1920's, Abraham Fraenkel was familiar with Polish set
theory but was less versed in Polish logic; the logicians in Gettingen were
not yet fully familiar with the results obtained in Warsaw; nor had the
relations of the Polish logicians with Heinrich Scholz and his group in
Münster yet developed. The majority of Germans were intensely hostile to the
restored Polish nation because of the loss, in the peace of Versailles, of the
territories inhabited by Poles, especially the so-called Polish Corridor,
which joined Warsaw to the sea while separating Berlin from Königsberg, the
city of Kant. Even many German intellectuals had an idiosyncratic aversion to
Poles, which the latter, mindful of one hundred and fifty years of oppression
by Prussia, reciprocated. Vienna and the Viennese, on the other hand, before
the rise of Hitler were well-liked by Polish-speaking people, gentiles and
Jews alike. Of the three neighbor nations that had divided up the Polish
kingdom in the eighteenth century (Russia, Prussia and Austria), only Austria
had treated the Poles with consideration; and even when German nationalism
developed in Vienna there was relatively little friction with the Poles since
the province of Galicia which they inhabited had (in contrast to the Czech
territory) no extensive common border with the German parts of the empire.
Almost every Imperial Austrian government had included a Polish member, on one
occasion as prime minister. In Galicia, the elementary and secondary schools
were Polish. The University of Cracow, the alma mater of Copernicus, (founded
in 1364, a year before the University of Vienna and, next to that of Prague,
the oldest university in Central Europe) flourished; and under Austrian rule,
a University of Lwow (Lemberg) and a Cracow Academy of Sciences were founded.
Besides cultivating Polish traditions, these institutions developed a many-
faceted Polish culture distinguished by remarkable scholars, especially
mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers. Rationalism and logic pervaded
Polish intellectual life. So even those who left Galicia after World War I and
went to Warsaw, the capital of the liberated nation, kept rather pleasant
memories of the old Austria. As for example, Waclaw Sierpinski one of the
founders of the Polish school of mathematics, sent me from Warsaw a photograph
of the decree appointing him to his first professorship, signed by the
Austrian minister of public instruction.” (Menger, 1994, p. 144ff)


“After I had sent offprints of my first paper on dimension theory to the
Warsaw topologists in 1923. we regularly exchanged offprints of our
publications. About 1920, the Warsaw mathematicians had started a remarkable
journal, the Fundamenta Mathematicae, unique in its devotion to abstract set
theory, the theory of point sets, and the foundations of mathematics. Soon I
was in correspondence with several contributors, especially Bronislaw Knaster
and Kazimierz Kuratowski. In the autumn of 1929, the mathematicians of the
University of Warsaw invited me there to deliver a lecture. As I observed
during this and subsequent visits, Warsaw between the two world wars had a
marvellous scientific atmosphere. The interest of the mathematicians in their
own as well as their colleagues' and students' work was of an intensity that I
have rarely observed in other mathematical centers. I discovered the same
spirit in the Warsaw School of Logic. But up to that time the Polish logicians
had been somewhat isolated. The country to which Polish scholars traditionally
turned in order to attract the attention of the Western world was France, with
which Poland was also in a close political alliance. Polish mathematicians
published many of their results in the Comptes Rendus of the Paris Academy of
Science, but in the field of logic the situation was somewhat different. The
French logicians Louis Couturat and Jean Nicod were no longer active; and the
brilliant young Jacques Herbrand could not help the Polish logicians much in
France. In fact, before his untimely death a few years later, he published
some of his own most important papers in Polish journals. French
mathematicians were not greatly interested in mathematical logic: Poincare had
derided Russell's derivation of arithmetic from logic; and the great set
theorists and analysts of the Paris school were in disagreement about
foundational questions. In fact, when a young Polish logician submitted an
interesting logical paper dealing with the axiom of choice to one of the most
outstanding mathematicians of France the paper was rejected.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 144)


“So I finally arrived at the conclusion that the members of the Circle must be
thinking of the reduction of mathematics to logic claimed in the Principia
Mathematica in 1910. That mathematics proceeds according to logic has of
course been known for 2000 years. That logic reduces analysis to arithmetic is
one of the great results of the nineteenth century. What Russell added in his
claimed reduction was a definition of the arithmetical terms, and a proof of
the arithmetical axioms, by logic. This last step in the reduction was
disputed by Poincare and by the intuitionists and has ceased to be unequivocal
because of the discovery of n-valued logics, all of which came up in the
Circle later. But be that as it may, I failed to see what the ill-defined use
of the term 'tautology' in the provocative reference to mathematics as a
system of tautologies substantially added to Russell's claim that mathematics
can be reduced to logic. Another of my questions concerned language. I
objected to the recurring references in the Circle to the language and
repeatedly asked Carnap, Schlick and other members what justified the implied
belief in the uniqueness of language. But on this point, too, I failed to
receive a satisfactory answer. Schlick did not seem to take the question
seriously. In the course of the following years, however, Carnap not only gave
up that belief but emphasized the importance of the existence of a
multiplicity of languages between which one may choose, while Schlick and
Waismann continued speaking about the language.” (Menger, 1994, p. 140f)


“That Wittgenstein was influenced by what he heard from Brouwer is clear.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 135)


“In March of 1928, a few weeks after that conversation, it was announced that
the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer would give two lectures on philosophy
of mathematics. These talks were to be the first in a series of guest lectures
by foreign scientists - about three speakers each year. The series was
financed by a few industrialists whom the physicist Felix Ehrenhaft had
interested in this project. The lectures, to be held in the auditorium of one
of the university's institutes of physics, were open to the public. As it
turned out, all lectures in that series were well attended by students and
faculty as well as by professional and business men interested in science.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 130)


“Wittgenstein's particular resentment against mathematicians. Schlick's
awareness of this fact may have been one of the reasons why, in 1927, he
introduced Carnap, Feigl, and Waismann (who was by then definitely a
philosopher rather than a mathematician) to Wittgenstein while keeping
mathematicians away from him.” (Menger, 1994, p. 129f)


“While the overindulgence of some metaphysicians in coining new terms is
irritating to the logician and often appears to him a symptom of charlatanism,
a much more insidious practice is the deviant use, so common in metaphysics,
of words of everyday language. […] Philosophy in the Mauthner-Schlick-
Wittgenstein sense of a clarifying activity, however, is not an object of the
preceding criticism. It is true that a philosophical discussion of this kind
too starts with unproven sentences made up of undefined words. But the most
important of those sentences are methodological suggestions, advice, warnings
and the like. And the terms that they include, such as 'term', 'sentence' and
the like, are (for the purpose of the discussion!) universally understood.
Lists of the primitive elements of those clarifying discussions can be, and
have been, provided.” (Menger, 1994, p. 122)


“The lack of consensus concerning the meaning of some metaphysical terms
results in a groping after definitions. So we get sentences expressing one
word in terms of others that have been introduced in sentences preceding the
one under consideration. This procedure is reflected in frequent changes of
some of those preceding sentences - changes in content, not only in form! -
and the retraction of the original formulations. This, too is a familiar
situation in descriptive natural science, where new discoveries necessitate
perpetual restatements, just as all swans are white had to be restated after
the discovery of Australia. A logician sympathetic with informality in
presenting logically unconnected metaphysical sentences may condone this
practice. For while it has been traditional since Euclid to place at the
beginning of a theory, sentences which, as we know since Pasch, serve as
implicit definitions of the extralogical terms, it is not logically necessary
to do so; and consistent systems of reformulation are not illegitimate.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 121f)


“An array of unrelated sentences may be unrewarding to the logician. But it is
impeccable as long as the writer refrains from claiming that logical relations
exist. Unfortunately, however, just such pretensions are not uncommon in
metaphysical writings. They are demonstrated by unjustified, thoughtless use
of particles such as 'hence', 'therefore', 'consequently', and the like.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 121)


“The paucity of logical interrelations and interconnections reduces
metaphysical theories, as already observed, essentially to serial or ramified
arrays of propositions with few, if any, proofs or nontrivial consequences - a
situation similar to that occurring in descriptive natural science or in some
religious creeds. For example, the Muslim creed is the simple conjunction of
seven theses: I believe in Allah and in his angels and in his prophets and in
his books, etc. As an extreme case, one may consider total unrelatedness.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 120)


“Metaphysical concepts are not as strictly interrelated as are, e.g. the ideas
of points and lines in the postulates of affine geometry; nor are the various
metaphysical sentences as closely interconnected as are the geometric
postulates. Yet such strict interrelations and close interconnections are by
no means confined to geometry. They exist, to a greater or lesser extent, in
all the domains in which axiomatic theories have been developed, from logic to
sociology; and in principle, it is of course conceivable that metaphysical
concepts might also be interconnected in sentences that yield nontrivial
strictly logical inferences. But it is hard to see how this might be done for
concepts such as essence and existence, substance and attribute, the absolute
and the like; and, at any rate, it has, to the best of my knowledge, never
been done so far. The second difference concerns the understanding of the
meaning of the extralogical terms, many of which are borrowed from the
everyday language. Strictly speaking, a consensus on this point is irrelevant
since a deductive theory is entirely based on its postulates; and neither
empirical facts nor intuitive pictures associated with the sentences, nor any
connotations of the terms must be utilized in its development or its
comprehension. Yet it is a help both in developing and in understanding a
simple geometric theory that everyone associates more or less the same ideas
with the words point and line.” (Menger, 1994, p. 119f)


“A logician who wanted to do for Spinoza's Ethics what Pasch did for Euclid's
Elements would face a more difficult and less rewarding task than Pasch did.
[…] The Ethics, on the other hand, would have to be completely rebuilt,
beginning with a very extended list of primitive terms and a greatly enlarged
list of postulates. And since Spinoza's concepts are hardly interrelated in a
rigorous sense it is doubtful whether a modern treatment of the contents of
that book would yield anything beyond a serial or ramified arrangement of
unproven propositions (including the majority of those that Spinoza called
theorems). Thus, after a thorough analysis of the terms and propositions, one
would be left with many assumptions yielding few, if any, logical
consequences. But a mathematician or logician considers his activity rewarding
only if, on the contrary, he has a chance to derive many consequences from few
assumptions.” (Menger, 1994, p. 118)


“An all-time ideal for the communication of ideas was created in Euclid's
Elements, one of the greatest books ever written. The ideal, which the book
itself does not fully attain, consists in the presentation of an initial list
of sentences, sometimes referred to as postulates or axioms, which logically
imply the remainder of the communication. All that is needed for the
comprehension of the communication is the understanding of those initial
sentences and the operative knowledge of logic. Clearly, the basic sentences
include all the extralogical words that occur in the entire communication
except possibly some that are introduced by definitions in terms of words
included in the basic sentences. Most of these defined words serve as
abbreviations of frequently occurring expressions; and all of them can always
be replaced by the expressions for which they stand. Extralogical words that
are not present in the basic sentences or replaceable by words that are
present cannot possibly occur in sentences logically derived from the basic
ones. The insight into this situation, first achieved in Pasch's geometric
work has resulted in the following modern view. A deductive theory should
start with two lists of its 'primitive elements': a list of all undefined
words and a list of all unproven sentences. The development of the theory is
the deduction of consequences of those postulates.” (Menger, 1994, p. 107f)


“Summarizing what in the Tractatus immensely appealed to the members of the
early Circle one must mention, first of all, the idea that whatever can, in a
strict sense, be said about the world consists of (nontautological and
noncontradictory) compounds of elementary or atomic propositions and that the
only other propositions that can be asserted are the tautologies in the sense
defined in this chapter, the latter saying nothing about the world. The
attraction was enhanced by the statement (Tr. 2.223) that the truth or falsity
of a picture can be ascertained only by comparing it with reality - a method
that the Circle applied to nontautological propositions. In contrast,
tautological propositions (which make up logic and have no content) are
recognized as true by their mere form. The Circle linked these views with
classical philosophy by identifying the elementary propositions and their
nontautological and noncontradictory compounds with synthetic, and the
tautologies with analytic, propositions in the traditional sense. The former
are clearly empirical; the latter are based on the grammar of the logical
particles. There was no room for synthetic assertions a priori.” (Menger,
1994, p. 101)


“Three aspects of the Tractatus were perfectly consonant with the spirit that
prevailed among the members of the Circle even before they had heard about the
book: Wittgenstein's antimetaphysical attitude; his positivism; and his view
that philosophy is not a theory yielding 'philosophical sentences' but rather
an activity aiming at the logical clarification of thoughts.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 90)


“It was in 1924, I believe, that the geometer Kurt Reidemeister, a member of
the early Circle, studied the book at Schlick's and Hahn's request and
presented an extensive report about it in a meeting.” (Menger, 1994, p. 89)


“In 1930, I accepted an invitation for a year in the United States. After my
departure, I never saw Mrs. Stonborough again. My relations with Clara
Wittgenstein continued until her terminal illness in 1935. Lydia Oser-
Wittgenstein, whom her aunt Clara had legally adopted in that year, spent the
last years of her life on the estate in Thumersbach. Visits of her family,
especially her cousin Paul, who played the piano for her, were among the
highlights of her life, and that of my aunt, who was Lydia's guest from the
beginning of the war to her death in the mid-1950s. […] In the early 1960s,
when I finally overcame my aversion to seeing Austria again, I visited Lydia
in Thumersbach on each of my trips. She died in the mid-1960s.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 81)


“A sister of Lydia was married to the noted German professor of education,
Hermann Nohl. Carnap, one of the prominent members of the Vienna Circle,
studied at the University of Jena before World War I and held Nohl in high
esteem. Carnap's main teacher in Jena, however, was Frege, the father of the
enormous development of logic after Boole […]. around 1910 he was completely
unknown, and Wittgenstein was one of his very first admirers. In the
mid-1920s, I once met Nohl in Lydia's house.” (Menger, 1994, p. 80)


“Stonborough was a spiritual follower of Tolstoy, as were at various periods
several members of her family, including her brother Ludwig.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 80)


“While the other members of her family lived quiet, rather retired lives, the
Stonboroughs were frequently seen at official functions. After World War I,
they donated funds to the Viennese Academy of Science, enabling that
institution to continue the publication of its proceedings. Mrs. Stonborough
spoke with great respect, almost admiration, of the Viennese minister of
finance, Breitner, although, as I had been told, her lawyers had filed
lawsuits against the city in taxation matters. Mrs. Stonborough was a very
intelligent person with various interests that included mathematics. In this
field she had been tutored by a Professor Rothe of the Vienna Polytechnic. […]
In 1927 just after the house that her brother Ludwig had designed and built
for Mrs. Stonborough was completed, she invited me there for dinner. The
building stood on top of a little knoll in a garden that took up a small city
block located in a not very attractive part of Vienna. The garden was
surrounded by a high wall so that from the street one could hardly see the
building. The house was uncompromisingly modern, without, however, resembling
the work of Loos, whom Wittgenstein knew well. The beautiful interior offered
some impressive vistas. There was a well-lit hall from which one could look
into several rooms. Its only decoration was a Greek statue of white marble in
a niche.” (Menger, 1994, p. 78f)


“In Clara's house, I met several relatives of hers, in particular, on a number
of occasions her niece Mrs. Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, one of the
sisters of Ludwig and Paul, married to an American but living with him in
Austria.” (Menger, 1994, p. 78)


“Clara Wittgenstein had a string quartet under her patronage and arranged
musical afternoons in her Viennese home. On two of these occasions I briefly
met her nephew, Ludwig's brother, the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost
his right arm during World War I, I believe in Russia. Despite this terrible
handicap, he decided to continue his career as a concert pianist. One of his
main problems was the paucity of piano pieces for the left hand; and of course
he did not want to repeat these same few pieces over and over again. So he
commissioned concertos for piano left-hand from some of the greatest composers
of the first quarter of the century including Ravel, Reger, and Richard
Strauss. These pieces he then played in public concerts. At the dinners in her
home, Clara spoke in the liveliest way of the latest events and books. The old
lady was one of the first in Vienna to read Sinclair Lewis, whose Arrowsmith
greatly fascinated her.” (Menger, 1994, p. 77)


“In the summer of 1923, while roving through the Alps, I came to Thumersbach
on the beautiful Zeller See in the province of Salzburg, where Miss Oser was
spending a vacation on an estate of her aunt Clara. I dropped in to see her,
was cordially received, and met Miss Clara Wittgenstein, then almost 70. She
was a frail looking person of the utmost simplicity; but a conversation with
her soon revealed not only a superior mind, extensive knowledge, and wide
interests but also a very strong will. There was in her speech that trace of
Viennese dialect that was characteristic of the German then spoken in the
circles of the highest bureaucracy and by the Austrian aristocrats. Clara's
numerous nieces and nephews - especially, as I was told, Ludwig Wittgenstein -
revered her deeply. After that visit to Thumersbach, Miss Wittgenstein,
invited me from time to time to her home in Vienna and to her estate in
Laxenburg, a baroque palace built in that suburb by the empress Maria Theresa
for one of her generals or ministers. […] When Clara's parents were still
alive it was there that Brahms played the piano.” (Menger, 1994, p. 76)


“This grandfather, Hermann Wittgenstein, who died in 1876, was a man of the
highest cultural standards. He arranged musical evenings for his family and
the circle of his friends, which included luminaries of the famous medical
school. By marriage, the Wittgensteins were related to the family of the great
physiologist Ernst von Brucke and to the Kupelwiesers, who before World War I
developed the beautiful Adriatic Island of Brioni. Brahms was a frequent guest
and played the piano. Fifty years later, Hermann's daughter Clara told me that
when she was a young girl her father took her and one of her sisters (later
married to government councilor and professor Oser) to Holland. There, in
order to acquaint them with the Dutch language and culture, he engaged as a
tutor a promising young writer who proposed to read with them the manuscript
of a novel he was about to publish. The young man, Frederik van Eeden, became
one of Holland's renowned authors; and that novel, De kleine Johannes, made
him famous. ("The instruction was only moderately successful, though," the old
lady added smiling, "Since neither of us ever succeeded in pronouncing those
three Dutch words to van Eeden's satisfaction, we never went beyond the book's
title.") In the first decade of this century, the family was known in Vienna
for their keen awareness of the social obligations of wealth. In particular,
two of Hermann Wittgenstein's children, Clara and Karl (Ludwig's father)
donated millions to charity and generously subsidized, among others, a
Viennese organization whose aim it was to aid people in financial distress. An
aunt of mine (a sister of my mother) had been employed by this organization as
a social worker since the first decade of this century. Her work impressed
Clara Wittgenstein, in whose house she met Lydia Oser, an unmarried niece of
Clara, who had difficulties in walking because of a crippling childhood
disease. A close friendship developed between my aunt and Miss Oser, who
despite her handicap became active as a social worker.” (Menger, 1994, p. 75f)


“The Wittgensteins belonged to the wealthiest group in Austria. Before World
War I, their combined fortune had been estimated at 200 million crowns - the
equivalent of at least that many dollars after World War II. Their wealth
originated in the steel industry of the Austrian empire, largely developed by
Ludwig's father and grandfather, who were the Carnegies of Central Europe.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 74)


“two mathematicians who attended the meetings of the Circle, Kurt Gödel (not
listed among the members in 1927 because he joined the Circle only a little
later), and myself. My father owned a famous economics library with a
comparatively small philosophical annex of about 1,500 volumes, which,
however, included the collected works of practically all great philosophers
from Bacon and Descartes to about 1900. In my last two pre-university years I
made extensive use of this philosophical library: in fact, I wrote abstracts
of the main works from Bacon to Fichte. When I started a serious study of
physics and mathematics, however, I lost my interest in the traditional
philosophical systems and, for a while, even looked on them with some
aversion. Yet in 1922, a year after my father's death, when selling the
economics library to the Hitsotsubashi University (then in Tokyo), I retained
the philosophical annex, completed it during the next 10 years by acquiring
the complete works of the few classical authors that had been missing (such as
Pierre Gassendi and Pierre Bayle), and brought it up to date especially along
the lines of logic and philosophy of science, which interested me more and
more. Gödel studied a great deal of philosophy. In particular, he had always
been most intensely interested in Leibniz. Like myself, he also read Kant
carefully; but whereas my own reading of Kant's German successors had never
gone beyond Fichte, Gödel read more. One day he showed me from one of Hegel's
works a perfectly amazing passage that might have been a quotation from
Einstein. Although Hegel could not possibly have written it in the spirit in
which a scientist reads it today, Hegel seemed in that passage to anticipate
the general theory of relativity.” (Menger, 1994, p. 71f)


“Schlick was widely read in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, of the
Renaissance, and of the modern age. In particular, he had carefully studied
Kant, the neo-Kantians, and Husserl. Kraft had more than the customary
knowledge of a professor of philosophy. Carnap knew Kant, the neo-Kantians,
and the Brentano school well. Hahn, who had edited Bolzano's Paradoxes of the
Infinite, was a great admirer of Hume and of Leibniz, but had a strong dislike
for Kant because of the frequent changes of meanings that the terms in the
Critique of Pure Reason undergo. Neurath and Feigl, without being particularly
interested in the history of philosophy, knew a good deal about it, especially
the latter. Kaufmann, widely read, often looked at the topics under discussion
in the Circle from a historical point of view and quoted the English
empiricists, and - too often I thought - Kant. (Outside of the Circle it was
customary in Vienna at that time to attribute to Kant all kinds of modern
views, and to read them into the Critique of Pure Reason, while - likewise
outside of the Circle! - I also heard a joke referring to what repelled Hahn
in the Critique; that first of all, someone should translate Kant into
German.)” (Menger, 1994, p. 70f)


“there was great interest in music, in dramatic art, in literature including
lyric poetry, and even in some works of mystics.” (Menger, 1994, p. 70)


“Felix Kaufmann was a philosopher of law, a student of Kelsen's, and a member
of the Kelsen, as well as of the Mises Circle. For a living, he worked as the
Austrian representative of the oil company then called Anglo-Persian. Being an
ardent phenomenologist who cultivated ties with Husserl, Kaufmann did not wish
to be counted as a member of the Circle; but he attended its meetings
regularly. He was the only participant with a true sense of humor, Neurath's
wit being always caustic. He wrote amusing satirical ditties in the Austrian-
Bavarian dialect (called Gstanzln). One of his best Gstanzln had as background
Spann's holist fight against traditional economics. It paraphrased a well
known children's song by the Prussian Hoffmann von Fallersleben (who also
wrote the words of 'Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles').” (Menger, 1994, p.
68)


“Edgar Zilsel attended only a few of the meetings and, for reasons unknown to
me, wanted to be considered only as close to, and not as a member of, the
Circle. […] Zilsel was a militant leftist. I once heard him give a brilliant
talk at a meeting in Warsaw.” (Menger, 1994, p. 67)


“Theodor Radakovic had been an able student of Hahn's before the latter
returned to Vienna. He was assistant professor of mathematics at the
Polytechnical Institute in Vienna. I later induced him to collaborate with
students of mine in developing lattice theory. He was too shy to take part in
the discussions of the Circle although he attended the meetings regularly.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 67)


“I have often felt it was a great loss to the Circle that in 1931 Feigl stayed
on in the United States; and while he did probably more than anyone else to
make some of the Viennese ideas known in America, in the subsequent
discussions in the Circle, I badly missed him and the soberness that
characterized his judgments.” (Menger, 1994, p. 66)


“Friedrich Waismann studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of
Vienna in the early 1920's and took part in Schlick's seminars.” (Menger,
1994, p. 65)


“Kraft said that "transmission of validity (Geltungsvermittlung) can only come
about through rigorous deductive conclusions to which all methods, including
induction, must be reduced. […] Hence the clearest, most perfect construction
of knowledge lies in a deductive axiomatic system, in which the hypotheses are
explicitly formulated as initial assumptions while the development is purely
deductive. Even the validity of such a system is only hypothetical since there
are no immediately certain, self-evident propositions (at least about reality)
which could serve as a starting point. Applied to 'the world of perceptions,
the validity of such a theory consists in the agreement between the deduced
and the observed facts." Kraft later applied these ideas to the
Geisteswissenschaften (humanities), denying them Verstehen or intuition as an
admissible special method. Like Schlick, Feigl, and myself, Kraft by no means
shared all the political ideas and ideals of Neurath, although the latter
sometimes presented to the public, perhaps unintentionally, the idea of a
politically homogeneous Circle. Schlick especially seemed to resent this since
in Vienna, the circle was named after him, the Schlick-Kreis.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 65)


“Victor Kraft attended the meetings of the Circle regularly and often took
notes though he rarely spoke in the discussions. He had started around 1911 as
a philosophical realist in the sense of assuming the reality of an external
world as a hypothesis for the explanation of the world of perceptions.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 64)


“Carnap, who, as far as I know, was a strict teetotaler, lived very modestly.
[…] He had socialist leanings but I had the impression that he never got
around to thinking seriously about the economic problems connected with
various forms of social organization. He was, however, a truly liberal and
completely tolerant man, and stood up for the underprivileged and the
persecuted whenever an occasion arose.” (Menger, 1994, p. 64)


“Rudolf Carnap had visited Vienna in the spring of 1925 before I left the city
for Amsterdam. At that time, he and I had a long talk about his work and about
the theories of dimension and of curves which I was then developing and in
which he was greatly interested since he had just finished a booklet about
space.” (Menger, 1994, p. 63)


“He invited excellent graphical artists, among them the German Gerd Arntz and
the Dutchman Peter Alma, - the Belgian Frans Masereel he considered too
romantic - and commissioned them to design the units; e. g. the identical men
representing the nations; the ships standing for navies; the pictures
representing units of produce, industrial output. And he promoted this
Bildstatistik with his full enthusiasm and energy first in Vienna, later in
Amsterdam, and finally in London, where he founded the Isotype Institute.
Along with the great aesthetical enjoyment that I derived from the work of the
graphical artists of the 1920's, I also had the feeling that their work was
the artistic counterpart of the tendency to abstraction in mathematics just as
impressionism and the philosophy of Mach have been called artistic-scientific
counterparts. Abstraction began to pervade mathematics in the first decade of
this century. Ernst Steinitz began to develop algebra in abstract fields
rather than in the concrete fields of numbers that were a bequest of the 19th
century. Frechet generalized the idea of space by selecting only a few
absolutely essential properties of the Euclidean, non-Euclidean, and some
other concrete spaces and by defining an (abstract) metric space as anything
possessing just those properties. While Frechet and others, had used these
abstract spaces in analysis (as I also did in the theories of curves and
dimension), I found in the late 1920's that they can also serve as the basis
of a geometry in the more traditional sense; and I developed what I called a
metric geometry, including theories of betweenness, of geodesic line and
curvature of curves and of surfaces in these abstract spaces. Analogously, the
graphic artists of the 1920's selected only a few absolutely essential
features of types of objects and people and represented, as it were, the
Platonic ideas of those objects by these abstractions.” (Menger, 1994, p. 63f)


“In the late 1920's, Neurath became greatly interested in contemporary graphic
art; and in this field our interests met. He wanted to utilize that kind of
art for what he called Bildstatistik (Pictorial Statistics).” (Menger, 1994,
p. 62)


“In 1915, Neurath got intensely interested in optics through Mach's book on
this subject and studied a classification of systems of hypotheses. In 1919 he
served in the short-lived communist government in Munich, and was imprisoned
for a short time when the regime broke down. He then fled to Vienna. Later,
Neurath wrote papers about the economic theory of value and at the height of
the controversy about Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, he published
a booklet 'Anti-Spengler.' Neurath was strongly opposed to any
parapsychological investigations and considered all mediums frauds. He was
particularly opposed to the involvement of Hahn (his brother-in-law), whom he
did not regard as qualified to unmask the swindlers. "Who looks into these
matters?" he once said to me answering his own question (of course in
sociological categories), "Uncritical, run-down aristocrats and a few
supercritical intellectuals such as Hahn. Studies of this kind further the
belief in supernatural forces and serve only reactionary groups. And what
results have ever come from this sort of thing?"” (Menger, 1994, p. 62)


“"Listen to a more scientific version," Neurath said, and he told us of a
starfish placed on the raised center of a tray, each arm in one of five
symmetrically arranged cups underneath. Four cups were filled with water, one
with nutritious solution; and soon the star fish slipped down into the right
cup. When three adjacent cups were filled with a solution it took the animal
much longer to decide and to slip slowly into the middle cup of the three.
Finally all five cups were filled with the same solution; and the fish in the
center starved and dried out.” (Menger, 1994, p. 61f)


“Otto Neurath was a man of immense energy and curiosity and was very fast in
grasping new ideas. However, he looked at everything - ideas as well as facts

through an often distorting lens of socialist philosophy and with an eye to
the possible effects of the ideas and facts on a socialization of society. I
have never seen a scholar as consistently obsessed with an idea and an ideal
as Neurath. In conversations and discussions he was knowledgeable, lively,
witty, and entertaining. He knew stories appropriate to almost any situation,
usually eliciting a ‘se non è vero, è ben trovato’ from his listeners. […] He
told it in a discussion of determinism when someone brought up the fable of
Buridan's ass.” (Menger, 1994, p. 60)


“Olga Hahn-Neurath, Hans Hahn's blind sister and Otto Neurath's wife, had that
type of poise and calmness that one only finds in some of the blind. She
attended the meetings of the Circle as well as her brother's seminars
regularly, always smoking a big cigar. In her youth she had written three
papers (one, jointly with her later husband) on the algebra of classes in
Schröder's presentation, which Clarence I. Lewis in his Survey of Symbolic
Logic ranks "among the most important contributions to symbolic logic."”
(Menger, 1994, p. 60)


“A minor but appreciable part of Hahn's free time was devoted to
parapsychological studies.” (Menger, 1994, p. 59)


“Hans Hahn, in many ways the exact opposite of Schlick, was a strong,
extroverted, highly articulate person who always spoke with a loud voice. […]
at the end of the war, he distributed pacifist leaflets - an act which, as his
friend Schumpeter told me, made his position untenable in German universities.
Hahn was a convinced socialist. In the faculty of the School of Philosophy at
the University of Vienna, he always articulated his unpopular leftist
convictions freely and forcefully. He protected the weak wherever he could. In
most other matters, however, he had a penchant for compromise sometimes too
great a penchant for my taste. Scientifically, Hahn was a many-sided
mathematician some of whose achievements have not been given due credit. For
example, the normed vector spaces that mathematicians all over the world call
Banach spaces were discovered independently and simultaneously by the Polish
mathematician Stefan Banach and the Austrian Hahn and ought to be called
Banach-Hahn spaces. Actually, the American Norbert Wiener also formulated the
concept at the same time and independently of the two Europeans; but he never
drew any inferences from his definition whereas Hahn, in the same way as
Banach, used it as the starting point of a systematic theory. Besides, he is
known for his work in the calculus of variations, on non-Archimedean systems,
set-theoretical topology, real functions, and Fourier integrals. Hahn had an
extensive mathematical knowledge. Once at a meeting of German-speaking
mathematicians, a group of the most outstanding of those attending in Hahn's
age bracket tested their mathematical knowledge by asking each other
questions, and Hahn was the winner of the tournament. He was a teacher of
supreme clarity. In his lectures he proceeded by imperceptible steps, and at
the end of each hour left his audience amazed at the mass of material he had
covered. His first course as lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of
Vienna in 1907 dealt with the calculus of variations. It was attended, among
others, by Erwin Schrödinger who, then close to his doctorate, kept detailed
notes of Hahn's course.” (Menger, 1994, p. 58)


“In 1923/24 I took part in a seminar that Schlick conducted. Herbert Feigl and
Friedrich Waismannn also attended. This was my first occasion to admire
Schlick's talent for conducting stimulating discussions with calmness and
unshakeable equanimity.” (Menger, 1994, p. 56)


“As a lecturer Schlick was clear; but he always spoke in a low voice and
usually in a monotone. While his speech was definitely not of the Austrian
variety, neither was it characteristic of someone coming from Northern
Germany.” (Menger, 1994, p. 56)


“Schlick respected every person's political and religious convictions. When
after Hitler's coming to power in Germany the Catholic philosopher Dietrich
von Hildebrand followed a call of the Christian-Social minister of education
to the University of Vienna, and felt quite isolated in the faculty meetings
of the then ultra-nationalistic School of Philosophy, it was Schlick who
accompanied him and introduced him to less militant colleagues. But Schlick
was strongly opposed to mixing intellectual studies with political ideals.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 56)


“The size of the Circle varied from 10 to 20 in the course of the years.
During each academic year, the list of those attending remained on the whole
the same, except for foreign guests.” (Menger, 1994, p. 55)


“The meeting place of the Schlick Kreis was a rather dingy room on the ground
floor of the building in the Boltzmanngasse that housed the mathematical and
physical institutes of the university. The room was filled with rows of chairs
and long tables, facing a blackboard. When we were not in session it was a
reading room, occasionally used for lectures. Next door, there was a small
library and a tiny office for Schlick and his assistant. Those who arrived
first at the meeting of the Circle would shove some tables and chairs away
from the blackboard, which most speakers used. In the space thus gained, they
arranged chairs informally in a semicircle in front of the blackboard, leaving
one long table for those who brought books along or wished to smoke or take
notes. People would stand in informal groups until Schlick clapped his hands.
Then the conversations stopped, everyone took a seat, and Schlick, who usually
sat at one end of the table near the blackboard, announced the topic of the
paper or the report or the discussion of the evening.” (Menger, 1994, p. 54)


“after long studies in unheated libraries during the cold winter of 1921 and
weakened by post-war malnutrition and overwork, I succumbed, in May 1921, to a
serious respiratory infection, continuing to work feverishly in the literal as
well as in the metaphorical sense. Too ill to attend the last meetings of the
seminar I wrote Hahn a letter summarizing my results. But in the fall of 1921,
my bout of the 'Viennese disease' became so serious that I felt it might be
years before I could elaborate my ideas. After being bed-ridden for several
months I had to retire for almost a year to a sanatorium in Styria.” (Menger,
1994, p. 45f)


“I was completely enthralled; and when after that short introduction, Hahn set
out to develop the principal tools used in those earlier attempts - the basic
concepts of Cantor's point set theory, all totally new to me - I followed with
the utmost attention.” (Menger, 1994, p. 39)


“In March of 1921, just after Hahn's arrival in Vienna, I read a notice that
he would conduct a two-hour advanced seminar every Wednesday during the spring
semester, entitled Neueres über den Kurvenbegriff (News about the concept of
curves). At that time I was at the end of my first semester at the university
and primarily a student of physics, I was doubtful that I would be able to
follow the advanced mathematical discussions; and I had never seen Hahn
before. But after some deliberation, I decided to try.” (Menger, 1994, p. 38)


“As Hahn had indicated, Schlick, Carnap and he himself wanted me to attend the
meetings of the Circle because they were interested in the methodology of my
work on curves and dimension. On several occasions, these matters came up in
discussions of the Circle and they have been referred to in the writings of
Carnap and Popper.” (Menger, 1994, p. 38)


“What we did not know in the early 1920's was that our iconoclastic attitude
continued a tradition among Viennese students of philosophy which even then
was at least half a century old. This appears from a story by which Brentano
illustrated what he considered as the sad state of philosophical thinking in
Vienna when he arrived from Germany in 1876. In a meeting of the students of
philosophy, the speaker advanced the view that there had been a time for
theology, followed by a time for philosophy, until in the 1870's the time had
come for students of philosophy to study only exact sciences. One might think
Wittgenstein was the speaker; but he was not yet born. Brentano repeated with
deep indignation, "And this in a meeting that not only had been arranged by
students of philosophy, but to which they had invited me." While Brentano did
much to promote an unmetaphysical, but also unpositivistic philosophy, a
totally positivistic undercurrent remained. Quite recently, I discovered an
even older document attesting to the antimetaphysical spirit of young men in
Vienna. Looking through by father's old notes, I found that in 1867, just
before developing his interest in economics (which resulted in the publication
of his Principles of Economics in 1871), he planned to write a book Critique
of Metaphysics and of the so-called Pure Reason from the Empiristic Point of
View. He characterized its objectives in the following seven short paragraphs:
‘All so-called ideas a priori and knowledge from pure reason must be presented
as empirical statements or as errors, i.e. false experiences or empty
compilations of words (leere Wortzusammenstellungen). There is no truth of a
metaphysical nature and thus lying beyond the limits of experience. Beyond,
there are only rational calculi (Verstandeskalküle) and fantasies. There is no
metaphysics. There is only a theory of the correct observation and
consideration of things that is free of prejudices, be they accidental or
created by education. There are neither aeternae veritates as the dogmatists
claimed nor forms of perception and thought lying in us by which Kant replaced
the aeternae veritates. Kant rejects metaphysics and replaces it by the
critique of pure reason. I say, there is no pure reason. There is no riddle of
the world that ought to be solved. There is only incorrect consideration of
the world. This objection is directed against the essence of modern philosophy
and against the form of empiricism. Mere materialism has equally pernicious
consequences for science as mere idealism. Just as the latter confuses the
world, so the former makes it shallow.’ Unfortunately, my father never carried
out his plan to write a book along these promised lines.” (Menger, 1994, p.
34f)


“In my student days in Vienna (1920-24), one could frequently hear discussions
concerning the theory of relativity, the foundations of physics and geometry,
and related topics - not only in the Philosophical Society and among students
of science but also at almost every gathering of members of that numerous
scientifically interested intelligentsia made up of professional and business
men and the spirit of Mach prevailed. Because of Boltzmann's great work and
his lectures still another point of view became widely known and influential -
looking at phenomena in the large as statistical results of events in the
small. Good semipopular writings by the physicist Franz Exner of the
University of Vienna helped to spread this view. Later Hahn's lectures and
seminars brought logic, the foundations of arithmetic, and the work of Gottlob
Frege and Russell into the foreground, though mainly among philosophically
interested students of mathematics and science. I had many discussions with my
friend and fellow-student of mathematics, Otto Schreier, who was to develop
into one of the most outstanding group theorists and whose untimely death in
1929 was a great loss for mathematics. After reading books on traditional
philosophy and especially on social science we arrived at the conclusion that
most of the numerous controversies in those fields were actually about nothing
but definitions; and as mathematicians we felt that all definitions are
arbitrary and command acceptance only by convention. Another topic of
discussion, especially when our friend, the phenomenologist Felix Kaufmann,
joined us was the existence of meaningless sentences, Kaufmann claimed that
besides true propositions such as "snow is white," and false propositions such
as "coal is white," there were meaningless propositions such as "Cesar
Franck's symphony is white." Schreier emphatically denied Kaufmann's view and
maintained that the third sentence was simply false: a symphony is not white.
Later discussions in the Circle seemed to vindicate Kaufmann in this matter
although I myself, ever since thinking about this problem, have considered the
use of the term 'meaningless' as subject to a good deal of arbitrariness. (I
have also always felt that it is easy to lose all common sense in such
discussions and therefore found it refreshing when a young female student, who
happened to be present at one of them without seeing the point of the
controversy, said to Kaufmann, "I don't understand why you insist on that
sentence being meaningless. Has anyone claimed that Franck's Symphony is
white?") Still other discussions centered on intuition. Kaufmann, an ardent
admirer of Husserl, believed that Wesensschau (intuitive grasp of essences)
was the foundation of various statements and proofs. When I asked for details
Kaufmann urged me to study Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phenomenologie
(Ideas, General Introduction to Phenomenology). But I stumbled right at the
beginning, where I read what purported to be a definition of essence: "Essence
is that which in the primordial being of a thing is found as its what" ("Wesen
ist das im ureigenen Sein einer Sache als ihr Was vorfindliche"). Nor was I
enlightened when I read that "whatever presents itself in intuition in
primordial form is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though
only within the limits in which it presents itself." For I reflected that all
continuous curves had presented themselves even to the intuition of the
greatest mathematicians before Bolzano and Weierstrass as having tangents; and
since the pre-Bolzano mathematicans simply accepted the continuous curves "as
they gave themselves out to be" they made assertions (e.g. that all such
curves have tangents) which were simply false. To be sure, Husserl's words 'in
primordial form' especially the phrase "only within the limits in which it
presents itself" may be used as an escape to uphold his statement even in view
of honest appeals to intuition that are blatantly incorrect. But if so used,
those qualifying clauses deprive Husserl's statement of any content. In my
student days, I was greatly confused by Hermann Weyl's praise of Husserl. I
had not as yet realized as I did later, after meeting Weyl and hearing him
lecture, that that great mathematician had a strong penchant for metaphysics.
Schlick after meeting Weyl on a vacation told me that he found him overawed by
tradition in the field of philosophy. In a seminar, the physicist Felix
Ehrenhaft read with us Duhem's important book Aim and Structure of Physical
Theories, which made a deep impression on us. It had been translated into
German by the Austrian physicist and politician Fritz Adler twenty years
before an English translation appeared. With another friend of mine I read
some chapters of Mauthner's three volumes Kritik der Sprache (Critique of
Language) and we were very much impressed. These and similar conversations and
readings undermined my original interest in the classical systems of
philosophy.” (Menger, 1994, p. 32f)


“Mach left Prague in 1895 when a chair for the philosophy of the inductive
sciences was created for him at the University of Vienna. When he retired in
1901 at the age of 63, he was succeeded by Ludwig Boltzmann until that great
physicist's death in 1906. From then until the arrival of Schlick, the
fortress was held by the Austrian philosopher Stöhr, who was strongly
influenced by Mach and also interested in a certain kind of critique of
language. In his Psychology he wrote, "If there were no words, there would be
no nonsense, at worst, errors ... Nonsense cannot be thought, it can only be
spoken." In 1898, he wrote a book Algebra of Grammar, which seems to be worth
being examined from a modern point of view. In the autumn of 1920, before he
could start his course on philosophy which, on the recommendation of many
students I planned to attend, Stöhr fell seriously ill and died. In 1922,
Moritz Schlick took the vacant Mach-Boltzmann-Stöhr chair (see IV,2). The
mathematican Hans Hahn, who had come to the university in 1921 (see V,3) and
was instrumental in bringing Schlick to Vienna, was greatly interested in
logic. He offered a lecture on the algebra of logic in the fall and winter of
1922; and during the academic year 1924-25 he devoted a seminar (jointly with
the geometers Kurt Reidemeister, Josef Lense, and Leopold Vietoris) to Russell
and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. There was a large attendance, and the
participants reported on the various chapters of the book. I attended only the
first half of the seminar, since in the spring of 1925 I left Vienna and went
to Amsterdam. Together with Schlick's courses on the theory of knowledge and
on philosophy of science, Hahn's seminar created the background and the basis
for the development of the Vienna Circle.” (Menger, 1994, p. 30)


“The Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna arranged meetings that
were open to the public, and people availed themselves of this opportunity in
large numbers. The Society, which during the second decade of this century was
strongly influenced by Höfler (see III, 5), published a Jahrbuch that
contained interesting contributions. One of the principal topics of discussion
was the foundations of mechanics.” (Menger, 1994, p. 29)


“Meinong had closer connections with British philosophy than with German
metaphysics. He wrote extensively about Hume and was in correspondence with G.
E. Moore and Russell.” (Menger, 1994, p. 26)


“During the fourth quarter of the last century, the German philosopher Franz
Brentano taught at the University of Vienna founding a widely ramified school
that was very influential thoughout the Austrian empire: Alexius Meinong and
his pupil Ernst Mally taught in Graz; Alois Höfler, another pupil of
Meinong's, in Vienna; Christian Freiherr von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty and his
pupil Oskar Kraus, in Prague. Kazimierz Twardowski was one of the first Polish
philosophers; Thomas Masaryk became the first president of the Czechoslovakian
republic after World War I; Edmund Husserl went to Germany. Höfler edited
Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre, a book greatly admired by Husserl. After his
retirement, Brentano started a rudimentary critique of language. He was mainly
interested in eliminating nouns that do not designate anything and correspond
to fictitious entities. Less praiseworthy, though widely acclaimed by his
followers, was his work in ethics, which culminated in what purported to be a
definition of the good as "that which is worthy of love" and "that which can
be loved with a love that is correct." The definition was implemented by
maxims such as the rule that, of various possible aims, one should always
choose the best. I, for one, have never been able to take such empty verbiage
seriously.” (Menger, 1994, p. 25)


“Mauthner was a great admirer of the 14th century German mystic Eckhard, in
particular of his sayings about silence. Silence appeared to Mauthner as the
culmination of the critique of language.” (Menger, 1994, p. 25)


“All that philosophy can do, according to Mauthner, is to give critical
attention to language. Traditional philosophy he described as word fetishism.
The purpose of language is to facilitate our activities. All our definitions
and most of our statements (in fact, all of them except communications of new
observations), Mauthner declared to be 'logical tautologies.' But he had no
clear concept of tautology and, averse to logic, he was completely unfamiliar
with the developments after George Boole and Schröder. Mathematics he
considered to be certain but totally uninformative. In contrast to
Wittgenstein after him, Mauthner wrote in a rather superficial feuilletonistic
style. But like his successor, he was convinced that he had definitely solved
all philosophical problems. As I was told by Edmund Benedikt, a prominent
Viennese lawyer and first cousin of Mauthner, that conviction made him
insufferably conceited. Strangely enough Mauthner had a strong inclination to
mysticism and tried to reconcile it with his atheistic views.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 24)


“Near the turn of the century, Fritz Mauthner (1848-1923), until then
journalist and bellettristic writer, started a massive critique of language.
He had studied in Prague. "Mach's epistemological positivism has been
subconscious in my mind," he wrote in his Memoirs: and Gershon Weiler says,
"The only teacher who was significant for Mauthner's later career was Mach ...
(Austrian philosophy), largely through the influence of Mach, had shown
features which marked it off from the general trend of German philosophy.
Mauthner, who chose to be a German over being an Austrian, became thus ... one
of the representatives of Austrian spirit in German philosophy." But he hardly
made any impact on philosophical thinking in Germany.” (Menger, 1994, p. 23f)


“Mach wanted to replace all causal explanations by descriptions involving
functions - a view that nowadays is even held by some economists. But it
should not be overlooked that even physical sciences abound in descriptions of
a merely qualitative nature. […] A weakness that Mach's extreme empiricism
shares with John Stuart Mill's, lies in the attempt to base all of arithmetic
on experience. Most of Mach's work was done in Prague, which he left in 1895,
when a chair of the philosophy of the inductive sciences was created for him
at the University of Vienna, He retired in 1901 at the age of 61. Mach, who
had many friends and followers in the English-speaking world, exerted a great
and lasting influence in Austria.” (Menger, 1994, p. 23)


“Mach was against models in physics, as was Pierre Duhem, who called them
parasitical elements of explanations; and in this train of thought, Mach
strongly opposed atomism. It is true that most of the experimental support of
atomism was discovered after his time; yet I have never understood how Mach
could ignore the fact that the alternative - the assumption of continuous
distribution of matter - is likewise based on unproven and indeed unprovable
assumptions. The granular structure of matter, once experimentally
ascertained, would remain established forever; whereas the assumption of a
continuous distribution would always be threatened by the possiblity that
refined experimental techniques might later disprove it. One of Mach's
greatest achievements, which made him a precursor of Albert Einstein, was his
early insistence on the relativity of all observed motions, even of
accelerated motions including rotations. Newton had tried to prove that the
latter are absolute (i.e. relative to absolute space) by pointing to the
centrifugal forces in rotating bodies. The bulging of the equator of a
rotating plastic sphere (usually described as the flattening of the sphere at
the poles) is an example. Mach pointed out that such a rotation is relative to
the fixed stars of distant but immense combined masses, and made the ingenious
suggestion that if an enormously heavy ring or shell were rotated, then a
plastic sphere 'at rest' in the center might also display a bulging equator.
In the early 1920's, Thirring actually deduced this phenomenon from Einstein's
general theory of relativity.” (Menger, 1994, p. 22)


“The physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916) developed a more modern and much more
radical positivism than that of Auguste Comte in France or Herbert Spencer in
England. He analysed his sensations into elements, and showed how physical
bodies, other humans, and his own self could be constituted by certain
comparatively stable complexes of such elements. The 'Introductory Remarks' to
his book Contributions to the Analysis of Sensation (1885) have the subtitle
'Antimetaphysical.' In these remarks, Mach attacked Kants's "monstrous notion
of a thing in itself, unknowable and different from its phenomenal existence."
He called some traditional philosophical questions pseudo-problems. He
furthermore proposed a combined and unified study of physical, physiological,
and psychological material. (I remember that years ago I read with amusement
an essay in which Freud seemed to claim implicitly a monopoly of the term
analysis, while speaking rather disparagingly of Mach's book.) Mach
interpreted science and mathematics from a point of view of intellectual
economy (Denkökonomie) considering them as laborsaving methods. With regard to
causality, Mach agreed with David Hume's skepticism. Other ideas of his,
(especially the denial of the existence of external things) and even his ways
of expressing them are very similar to Berkeley's, as Karl Popper documented
in detail a few years ago. The similarity had been clearly seen by Lenin who,
however, connected Mach with Bishop Berkeley even beyond scientific points of
contact - a fact that had led to a distrust of positivism, and at times to its
condemnation, in the Soviet Union.” (Menger, 1994, p. 21)


“Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre is not explicitly critical of metaphysics or of
language but is an encyclopedia (in four volumes) of pragmatic, totally
unmetaphysical methodology and contains interesting contributions to logic.
During his lifetime, Bolzano remained practically unknown. But at the
beginning of this century, his works began to become known and greatly
appreciated in Austria.” (Menger, 1994, p. 21)


“The logician, mathematician, and methodologist Bernhard Bolzano (1781-1848)
was the most important forerunner of Georg Cantor, the founder of set theory,
and of Karl Weierstrass, the creator of a rigorous theory of real functions.
While the metaphysicians were indulging in speculations about 'the absolute',
about infinity, and about continuity, Bolzano soberly studied infinite
classes, did away with Euclid's axiom that the whole is necessarily greater
than the part, and investigated one-to-one correspondence between sets. He had
a sound definition of continuous functions and described them in theorems
supplied with rigorous proofs. He even anticipated Weierstrass in defining a
continuous function that is nowhere differentiable, or, geometrically
speaking, in the construction of a continuous curve without any tangent -
something that even Weierstrass' contemporaries in the 1870's considered as
totally contradictory to geometrical intuition.” (Menger, 1994, p. 19)


“Austrians never contributed to the German type of metaphysics. that
culminated in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The great thinkers born in the
Austrian empire, Bolzano and Mach, used to philosophize along scientific
lines.” (Menger, 1994, p. 18)


“A remarkable feature of Vienna in those years was the existence of numerous
Kreise. […] There was of course a large number of socialistic discussion
groups (one conducted by Max Adler was totally Kant-oriented), and
psychoanalytic circles of various factions, which were attracting visitors in
ever-increasing numbers, especially from the English-speaking world, and
groups devoted to debates on educational reforms. Discussion circles connected
with the university included, among others, one conducted by Kelsen and one by
Mises. To the Mises Circle belonged Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich A. von
Hayek, and Fritz Machlup, who were later to continue the tradition of Austrian
marginalism in the English-speaking world. Particularly numerous were
philosophical circles: one, directed by Professor Heinrich Gomperz, was
historically oriented; others dealt with Immanuel Kant, with Sören Kierkegaard
and Leo Tolstoy (the latter's influence was enormous); and some circles
discussed the philosophy of religion; and others phenomenology. I knew about
these circles since most of them included one or another of my friends; but I
personally did not belong to any circle, except one that was non-scientific.
Until one day in the fall of 1927 Hahn said to me: "I hope you can join our
philosophical circle round Schlick. We meet informally about every other
Thursday evening in Schlick's Institute. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and some
younger people attend regularly." "Schlick has not seen me since my doctoral
examination in 1924," I answered, "I doubt that he remembers me." "I have
already spoken to him," Hahn said. "He remembers you well and is pleased with
the idea that you might join us." I thanked Hahn and accepted with
anticipation. Of the many intellectual circles that flourished in Vienna in
the 1920's, it was the one that its members called the Schlick-Kreis which was
to become known throughout the world as Der Wiener Kreis.” (Menger, 1994, p.
17)


“a group including Wagner-Jauregg, Schlick, Hahn, Thirring, and many others
(most of them scientists) formed a committee for the serious investigation of
mediums. Very soon, however, members began to drop out: first, Wagner-Jauregg;
soon after him, Schlick; so that by 1927 only two of the scientists were left,
my friends and former teachers Hahn and Thirring. They were not fully
convinced that any of the phenomena produced by the mediums were genuine; but
they were even less sure that all of them were not. They believed, rather,
that some of the parapsychological claims might well be justified; and that
certainly the matter warranted further serious investigation. Even though Hahn
tried to get me actively interested in the work of the committee I stayed away
except for one short contact.” (Menger, 1994, p. 15)


“In the first post-war years numerous mediums had appeared in Vienna and they
were viewed by the intelligentsia with the utmost skepticism. Finally, one day
in the early 1920's, the newspapers claimed that two physicists - professors
at the University of Vienna, one tall and one short - had exposed the entire
spiritualistic swindle.” (Menger, 1994, p. 14)


“Ludwig Wittgenstein admired both Weininger and Kraus. He is reported to have
read Kraus' periodical Die Fackel (The Torch) regularly. There was also a
large group of followers of Count Coudenhove-Calergi, who studied philosophy
at the University of Vienna under Adolf Stöhr and then wrote popular books on
ethics and sociology in a characteristic staccato style. In the mid 20's,
Coudenhove began propagating the formation of Paneuropa. […] Coudenhove warned
the Europeans that they would lose their freedom to Russia unless they united
in Paneuropa. In 1929, I met Coudenhove on a vacation and, after a few words,
he inquired whether I was a member of the Paneuropa Society. When I told him
that I was not, he asked in a serious, almost severe tone, “Why not?" I
explained that, while sympathizing with some of his ideals, I saw
insurmountable obstacles to their realization, especially the obstruction that
England would offer in continuance of her centuries-old policy of dividing the
continent. He shrugged his shoulders. It took a second world war, with the
break-up of the British empire in its aftermath, and the technological
development of the first and second third of this century to make at least a
large part of Coudenhove's prophetic proposal a reality.” (Menger, 1994, p.
13)


“There was, for example, the group of admirers of Josef Popper-Lynkeus, a
surviving friend of Mach […]. A large group worshipped the writer and lecturer
Karl Kraus […]. Some Viennese intellectuals of the 1920's, particularly women
and Jews, were greatly influenced by the writings of Otto Weininger.” (Menger,
1994, p. 12)


“The situation in the field of economics was less favorable. Josef Schumpeter
unfortunately had left Austria, after a not so very successful career as
minister of finance; and Hans Mayer, in the chair of Carl Menger, the founder
of the Austrian school of marginalists, spent most of his time and energy on
more or less futile attempts to counteract the holists. The American economist
Henry Schultz, who had visited Vienna for a few days in that period, told me
that the holist group had asked him only one question: Did he attack economic
problems from the point of view of the whole or of the parts? To which, in an
epitome of American pragmatism, Schultz had replied, "I attack a problem from
a point of view that promises to yield a solution." On the serious side,
Ludwig von Mises gave stimulating lectures without, however, clearly
separating the ideas of economic theory (which he presented with an
idiosyncratic opposition to the use of even simple mathematics) from his ideal
of complete laissez-faire. But, as I noticed on several occasions, Mises and
his group, who had only little influence on the economic policies of the
Austrian government, had deep insight into the theories of money, banking,
commerce and international trade, an insight which far transcended Austrian
conditions. In particular, I shall never forget the Cassandra-like prognosis
early in 1928 of a lady close to the group, who said, when the conversation at
a party turned to the fabulous prosperity in the United States and the
climbing stock prices in New York: "If the present policies - credit,
inflation and all - continue, then the whole story may end in a crash such as
the world has never seen before."” (Menger, 1994, p. 11)


“The Medical School, still first-rate, made Vienna a Mecca for Central and
Eastern European patients and physicians. Wagner-Jauregg had just received the
Nobel prize for his treatment of paralytic dementia using the organism that
causes malaria; Clemens von Pirquet had begun the study of allergies; Karl
Friedrich Wenckebach was developing drugs against heart disease. In the School
of Philosophy, outstanding botantists and geologists, historians and
philologists continued old trends. while the psychologist. Karl Bühler
cooperated with the reform of the schools and teacher training. In the Law
School. Hans Kelsen (who drafted the constitution of the Austrian republic),
and one of his students were doing pioneering work on the 'pure' theory of
law, studying the structure of the legal system - not so much the contents of
laws as the steps. beginning with a basic norm, by which they become laws.”
(Menger, 1994, p. 10)


“The Vienna of 1927 had again become a highly interesting and intellectually
lively city. When I arrived in September the town had outwardly calmed down
and recovered from the turmoil of July. There were theatrical and musical
performances of the highest quality. The State Opera (with Richard Strauss a
frequent conductor) was unsurpassed anywhere. Foreigners who observed Viennese
life at that time were amazed at the number of private as well as public
recitals of piano and chamber music; and so it became widely known that in
Vienna a larger proportion of the population than in most other cities enjoyed
classical music. But even more remarkable was the atmosphere at those
concerts; at the yearly series of Beethoven quartets it was one of almost
religious devotion. […] the unusually large proportion of professional and
business people interested in intellectual achievement. Many members of the
legal, financial, and business world; publishers and journalists, physicians
and engineers took intense interest in the work of scholars of various kinds.
They created an intellectual atmosphere which, I have always felt, few cities
enjoyed.” (Menger, 1994, p. 9f)


“Austrian liberalism had produced remarkable cultural results during the
second half of the 19th century and up to World War I. The Vienna medical
school, second to none, was world famous, even though Freud had to develop his
ideas outside of it. Outstanding scientists and historians taught at the
University of Vienna. The geologist Eduard Suess combined theoretical
discoveries with great practical achievements. The physicists Ernst Mach and
Ludwig Boltzmann and the Austrian economic school of marginalists were
internationally acclaimed. At the end of the century, Vienna brought forth
writers of typically Austrian cast, some of them - Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Hermann Bahr - of international stature. Gustav Mahler made
Vienna his home. Young painters broke out of the academic rut in a movement
called the Secession: among them was Gustav Klimt, too little known outside of
Austria. Artistic craft of a new type was produced in the Wiener Werkstätte
(Vienna Workshop), which still flourished in the 1920's; and Adolf Loos
introduced functionalism into Viennese architecture.” (Menger, 1994, p. 8)


“In the mid 1920's the points of greatest concentration of German nationalism
in Austria were the universities and polytechnic institutes.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 4)


“At one time, the leader of the anti-Czech German nationalists had the Czech
name Wotawa, while his anti-German Czech opponent had the German name Rigler.
Some purely Slavonic names were Germanized, as Blasek to Blaschke, others such
as Srbik were not changed, although some bearers of such names were militant
German nationalists. Among pre-war philosophers one of the most nationalistic
was the great pre-Wittgenstein critic of language, Fritz Mauthner, who was
born and reared as a Jew in Bohemia, studied in Prague and then emigrated to
Berlin since Vienna was not pro-German enough for his taste.” (Menger, 1994,
p. 4)


Karl Menger, Reminiscences of the Vienna Circle and the Mathematical Colloquium , ed. Louise Golland, Brian McGuinness, and Abe Sklar (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1994), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1102-7.


Wittgenstein - Exzerpte


Wittgenstein


Mises, der seine „Zirkulationskredittheorie“ inzwischen verfeinert hatte,
wagte in einer vorbereitenden Schrift der Zürcher Tagung des Vereins für
Sozialpolitik im Jahre 1928 die Feststellung, dass es nur noch eine einzige
Geldwerttheorie gäbe, nämlich die „monetäre Konjunkturtheorie“ (vgl. Mises
1928, 1).


1931 wurde Hayek zu einer Vorlesungsreihe an die London School of Economics
eingeladen, in der er unter anderem das Konzept des „Zwangssparens“
entwickelte. Veränderungen der Geldmenge oder des Zinssatzes, so Hayek, würden
stets zu einer Verschiebung der Nachfrage nach Konsumgütern und
Produktionsmitteln führen, so dass im Unterschied zum „freiwilligen“ Sparen,
dem echte Konsumwünsche zugrunde liegen, etwa im Falle einer Ausweitung der
Geldmenge die Gesamtheit der Konsumenten „gezwungen“ werde „ihren Konsum
einzu-schränken [...] nur weil sie weniger für ihr unverändertes Geldeinkommen
erhalten“ (vgl. Hayek 1931, 56).


In seiner Habilitationsschrift Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie (1929) ging
Hayek wie Mises davon aus, dass Konjunkturschwankungen stets durch
Kreditexpansion verursacht werden. Eine Geldmengenausweitung ziehe „immer eine
‚Fälschung’ der Preisbildung und damit eine Fehlleitung der Produktion“ nach
sich (Hayek 1929, 76). Vorangetrieben werde die Kreditexpansion durch das
Geschäftsmodell der Banken, da diese ihren Kunden eine möglichst hohe
Liquidität zur Verfügung stellen wollen (ebd., 81–92). Der von den Banken
geforderte Zins sei demnach kein „natürlicher“ Zins bzw. „Gleichgewichtszins“
(in der Hayek´schen Terminologie), sondern werde von den Liquiditätserwägungen
der Banken bestimmt (vgl. Hayek 1929, 103f; vgl. Schlesinger 1914, 128). Auf
Grund dieser theoretischen Überlegungen konnte Hayek im Februar 1929 eine
große Wirtschaftskrise in den USA voraussagen, die dann im Oktober des
gleichen Jahres tatsächlich eintrat (vgl. Steele 2001, 9).


Als nach umsichtigen Vorbereitungen von Mises 1927 das Österreichische
Institut für Konjunkturforschung, das heutige Wirtschaftsforschungsinstitut
(WIFO), seinen Betrieb aufnahm, wurde Hayek dessen erster Leiter. Recht bald
schon wurde das Institut zu einem der europäischen Pioniere der empirischen
Wirtschaftsforschung. Oskar Morgenstern (1902-1977), der 1928 mit
Wirtschaftsprognose sein Erstlingswerk veröffentlicht hatte, wurde Hayeks
erster Mitarbeiter und folgte ihm 1931 als Leiter des Instituts nach.


Deutlicher noch als in der ersten Auflage machte Mises in der zweiten Auflage
seiner Theorie des Geldes die „Erweiterung des Zirkulationskredites“ für die
Krise verantwortlich (vgl. Mises 1912, 434; Mises 1924 [1912], VI u. 374f). Da
Banken und Politik ein gemeinsames Interesse daran hätten, den Zinssatz weiter
abzusenken, um so „billiges“ Geld zu ermöglichen, sei ein Geldsystem zu
etablieren, das „von zielbewusstem menschlichem Eingreifen unabhängig ist“
(Mises 1924 [1912], 222), was eine Rückkehr zur Golddeckung bedeute (ebd., 222
u. 417–420).


Friedrich A. von Hayek verglich diesen Vorgang mit dem Ausgießen eines
zähflüssigen Honigs, der sich beim Ausgießen ungleichmäßig verteilt und eine
Verdickung an der Stelle des Zuflusses aufweist (vgl. Hayek 1969, 281).
Entgegen der weitläufigen Auffassung, der auch Menger und Böhm-Bawerk
anhingen, hielt Mises das Geld demnach für keineswegs „neutral“


Die sichtliche Neigung der älteren Wiener Schule staatliche Eingriffe in das
Geldwesen stets aus der Perspektive von Missbrauchsmöglichkeiten zu sehen,
hatte ihren Ursprung in der soliden juristischen Ausbildung ihrer Mitglieder,
die eine gewisse Sensibilität für Grundrechte zur Folge hatte. Erfahrungen aus
der Währungsgeschichte der Donaumonarchie trugen ebenso zu dieser Haltung bei.
Bereits Carl Menger hatte Kronprinz Rudolph gelehrt, dass staatliche
Notenpolitik „Willkür“ und „Gewaltthätigkeit gegen die Bürger“ enthalte (vgl.
Streissler/Streissler 1994, 136).


Ergänzend zu den Begriffspaaren „Kosmos/Taxis“ und „Nomos/Thesis“ unterschied
Hayek noch zwischen Werten und Zielen. „Werte“ seien dasjenige, was das
menschliche Handeln lebenslang leitet und kultureller Überlieferung entstammt,
wohingegen „Ziele“ das menschliche Handeln bloß für gewisse Augenblicke
bestimmen. Eine offene und freie Gesellschaft beruhe darauf, dass ihre
Mitglieder gemeinsame Werte haben, wohingegen die Möglichkeit der Freiheit
verschwinde, „wenn wir darauf bestehen, daß es einen einheitlichen Willen zur
Erteilung der Befehle geben müßte, welche die Mitglieder auf bestimmte Ziele
hin lenken“ (ebd., 223).


Morgenstern hielt sich zum Zeitpunkt des Anschlusses gerade im Ausland auf und
kehrte nicht mehr zurück. Zuhause war er unterdessen von seinem Stellvertreter
Richard Kamitz (1907-1993), dem späteren Finanzminister, als Institutsleiter
ersetzt worden.