The Murder of Professor Schlick Quotes

“Wittgenstein had explained his ideas on verification to Waismann and Schlick in late 1929 and early 1930, and Waismann then made them public in an article he wrote for the first volume of Erkenntnis. Verificationism offered a criterion for what was meaningful. Its proponents were motivated by the desire to make all domains of inquiry scientific, and so banish metaphysics from the domain of “meaning.” It claimed that unless something was open to being verified it was meaningless.”
― David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle

“Analytic philosophy has gone in various directions that the Circle would not approve. But the self-identifying merits of analytic philosophy are its meticulous attention to logic and language and the pursuit of clarity, the contempt for grandiosity, and the calling-out of nonsense. There is a suspicion of arguments that rely on “feel” or “intuition” over substance. The Circle was not unique in promoting these intellectual virtues, but they helped foster a climate in which they are now so much taken for granted that they are virtually invisible. In that sense, success of the Circle ideas lies in their apparent absence.”
― David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle

“One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was,” said Popper. His philosophy was “empty verbiage put together in statements which are absolutely empty.”19 On this even Carnap—not Popper’s biggest fan—concurred.”
― David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle

“On the whole, their message to their students remained steady: that science was good and metaphysics was bad. As Neurath put it to Feigl in 1938, “what we have in common will remain; as products of their time, the differences will fade.”
― David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle