Logical Positivism - The Vienna Circle

hello the vienna circle was a group of philosophically trained scientists and scientifically trained philosophers who met on thursdays in term time in vienna in the years after the first world war out of their meetings that emerge what's been called a revolutionary new doctrine logical positivism it rejected great sways of early philosophy from meditations on the existence of God to declarations on the nature of history as utterly meaningless the logical positivists were trying to remould philosophy in a world turned upside down not just by war but by major advances in science their hero was Albert Einstein when the Nazis took power they fled to England and America where their ideas put down new roots and went on to have a profound impact with me to discuss logical positivism a Barry Smith professor of philosophy at the Institute of philosophy at the University of London Nancy Cartwright professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics in the University of California and Thomas More professor philosophy at Manchester University Barry Smith what's the basic idea of the core of Roger thought logical positivism how radical was it this is very radical here we have the Vienna circle very impressed by science by developments in logic and mathematics especially developments in physics say but they're also very depressed by the lamentable state of philosophy you have competing philosophies metaphysical views about the nature of reality the ultimate nature of things and these views are locked into a pointless dispute where you can't see how to make any progress now the positivists in the vienna circle think we've got to give philosophy a new job it has to contribute to the advance of knowledge in the same way science and logic can contribute so they decide that philosophy doesn't have a doctrine to tell us it doesn't have a subject-matter of its own philosophy becomes a method it's a way of analyzing the statements and the logical structure of theories it's a way of deciding which statements are statements of signs that are factual meaningful can be tested and contrasting that with statements in logic and mathematics which are true not because we test them but because true by definition two plus two equals four follows from the meanings of the words that we use now this new method makes philosophy largely about demarcating meaningful talk which can be rigorously tested from the meaningless talk of metaphysics which had pretensions to describe some sublime set of facts some transcendental reality beyond the ordinary now this critique now becomes a critique of language and no longer as it was with Kant a critique of pure reason but lots of excellent overview can you can we just go back a little bit and tell us some of the people involved how did they get together did they discover that they had what did they do obviously they discover had this notion in common yes so the beginning of the movement is really when in 1922 Moorish Lick is appointed to Ernest marks chair in Vienna and he gathers around him a set of scientists and mathematicians and philosophers very scientifically minded philosophers and these are people who are ambitious they want to make progress they want to see how they can make a genuine contribution to the exciting ideas that are going on around them in physics in logic and mathematics they're impressed with Russell and frege's attempt to reduce mathematics to logic they're impressed with the new physics of Einstein and they say these are people who are telling us something we need to know so we as philosophers can't be locked in these pointless disputes so really the kind of philosophy that had been going on where you make claims that are untestable they cannot be decided we don't know what sort of experiences we would use to tell whether or not one theory was true and another was false they rejected them as meaningless can you pick up one or two more people you mentioned Schlick can you give yes our listeners an idea to two or three other of the key figures we will be returning to in this discussion yes I think the three key figures are Schlick carnap and neue rat so we can see slick as the sort of the leading figure around whom the vienna circle gather but more more dramatic I think is the involvement of otto neurath he's a sociologist he's a social scientist and he has a conception really of the movement that's taking place as part of a larger social movement he is interested in the unification of science he's interested in a community of philosophers and scientists working together in a sense this is philosophy by committee because you've got a lot of different views but they're trying to figure out what what they all think and what they share in common in between them you have Rudolf Carnap perhaps the most influential figure of the movement he is a superbly good logician he is very inspired by the works of Russell and he creates a way of rigorously testing scientific theories so in Vienna and we know what they're coming out of and we've got a few but the main players there Nancy Cartwright can you give us some sense of the scale of what they were rejecting yes Barry talked about them wanting to transform philosophy but that's only a small part of what they wanted to do I think transforming philosophy was a tool or possibly a side effect because they were interested in transforming society these people had gone through World War one Matan IRA had observed the ability to really regulate the economy and achieve the ends we needed to provide weapons and organized society to get all the munitions and food and clothes to the Troops and he also they also noticed that there's not just the science of physics that was opening up and coming up with fantastic fascinating new results but there was a huge increase in skills and information in statistics and they really did believe that with the proper use of scientific knowledge and social scientific knowledge one could transform society so they were involved in a bigger Enterprise than just transforming philosophy the emphasis on clear thinking exact formulation was going to be a tool to rid us of a kind of grand metaphysics that stopped social progress they were opposed to religion they were opposed to what they called superstition their opposition to hid alien philosophy wasn't just that it was nonsense which they thought it was since his very points are it you couldn't tie it down to anything so can you just develop that a little bit about how you go just for a few moments they thought is nonsense Haig was nonsense right why they thought it was nonsense because you have a grand ideas with very abstract very loose terms big claims about the spirit of history marching forward and when asked if you try and think about it what do these claims really tell us about real experience in the world around us they were Mexico method doesn't it I thought that didn't tell us anything that doesn't tell you anything so they were I think the important thing to start out from is that they were what in Britain we call empiricists they thought the source of knowledge about the world around us had to be our interactions and our experiences in the world around us and that our experiences in interactions in the physical world around us were the police for any further claims we made that anything we thought we were talking about that seemed to make sense but we couldn't tie it back to we're talking about as Barry said some transcendental or sublime views about the world and that's supposed to be the world we live in now what does what what support do those grand views have in our real experience in interaction with the world and they said when there's no support in a real experience of the world you not only can't decide whether what you're saying is true or false you're not saying anything so when you're having religious disputes and metaphysical disputes they're back to the word that I got from the nursery this is meaningless meaningless it's not just that it's not just that when you can't test it you don't know whether it's true or false it's that you think you're talking about something and when you get down to it there's nothing there it's vaporous nonsense was the word that the the English positivists used although there are very different people and a brilliant group of people they that there was a coherence about the mother since these Thursday meetings for once a Thursday evening is not Thursday morning anyway and they lived in a part of Vienna called Red Vienna and many were socialists many were Jews did they did that their politics play in very directly to all of them are just some of them almost all of them were dedicated socialists slickers a bit of a border case but they were dedicated socialists there was a lot of interaction with other movements in red Vienna there was a close connection between at wrote a book called the logo show Aufbau the logical construction of the world and nowadays we talk about Aufbau Bauhaus because the Vienna circle was closely associated with the Bauhaus movement and architecture they were interested in not was monoi Wright himself had been the there was a short-lived the socialist government in Bavaria immediately after World War one and Noah was the person who was the director of full social planning so he was going to employ these philosophical ideas which had already been somewhat developed in an earlier set of meetings before the war to organize all of Bavarian economies so these people were deeply embedded with a kind of movement to improve society by clean lines clear thinking attention to the details of life and not getting swept away by religious views that kept you from moving ahead in the right ways right on the serval the early 20th centuries maybe never with major scientific advances major scientific much as it happened before what I was signed so important in the approach of this group of people letters on one hand a sort of biographical reasons um Barry and and Nancy sort of sort of said and you said in your introduction they were if there were straight philosophers they actually had scientific training I mean Schlick to this PhD with marks Blanc the Andorian of the German physics yeah and NORAD was a sociologist Hanson were was a was a mathematician Frank was a physicist etc so they all had first-hand experience of science and they knew how scientific knowledge claims were being established and they contrasted that with philosophical knowledge claims and what what what they called the chaos of system and the anarchy of even philosophical terminology so philosophy rather came badly off by comparison and it's not also not just that that science simply was sober and one new word was talking but one was talking about science also made absolutely revolutionary advances and that's why Einstein was of this does the central central importance his general theory of or theory of general relativity for instance totally changed our ideas of space and time roughly speaking space was no longer fixed container through which time flowed but there was a sort of a multi-dimensional space-time and moreover the structure of that was variable and was determined by the distribution of mass energy you know at the specific location etc so those were enormously revolutionary ideas and they came out of science itself and they did nothing I told that Sarge interrupt you did they get nothing at all out of what we might loosely call the philosophical tradition from what Nancy saying it seems they rejected it lock stock and barrel well they were as Nancy said they were kind of empiricist so in that sense they they felt a certain allegiance with say David Hume in a number of his/her views and they also in the general approach could be could be thought they they wanted to renew the Enlightenment movement which they thought had they had sort of run out of steam and now after especially in those those dramatic days after the world war after World War one they wanted to renew that there there because I've ripped everything had to be built anew and they thought well let's do it properly this time the phrase how we know what we know was not the question that is that is how how habit fieger one students once once once poet he says there's a few basic question which you always always have to ask what is it that you did that you think you know and secondly how do you know it and ask this each and every time and if you do that you won't be led by the nose so can we take the person they challenged most who seemed to be the first mountain may look back to who can't Immanuel Kant and the an idea that was central to him which was synthetic a priori now can you explain that to our listeners and why this was so heavily challenged okay now the synthetic a priori was Khan's attempt to answer problems of previous emperors isms there were questions for instance like everybody assumed that every event has a cause but how do you prove that you can't prove your your basis of experiences only of events you have so far experienced you can from that kind of generalize that into the future over all events so one way out which can took is to say well look on the other hand on the one hand this supposition that every event is a cause underlies all our thinking on the other hand we can't prove it on the basis of experience where we must get it from somewhere else it must be as it were a truth of reason that we bring to our experience and but it was a truth of reason that said something about the world so it was synthetic it said something about the world it had had empirical content but at the same time it it wasn't learned from experience that came from within us from reason and in that sense it was a priori so that's a synthetic a priori and what they what the in in the course of the 19th century sort of continental philosophy kind of invented all sorts of synthetic a priori is for different different Sciences and some neo-kantian is invented synthetic a priori is for the social or historical Sciences etc and again the theorists of the Vienna circle sort of said what what what control do we what cognitive control do we have over the postulation of those things and they kind of rejected this and said look let's just go back to how we know we can get gain knowledge namely to go back to the positive sciences and there we have either empirical sources or we have logic so we either have analytic truth or we have synthetic truths the analytic truths are a priori the synthetic truths are a posteriori and therefore this third position that can't outline trying to bring the synthetic nd I priority gether we don't need it Myra Schmidt can we develop that we using the word verification as a key yes sure so exactly as Thomas said you you have this tradition of empiricism where all of our knowledge is derived from the senses but of course some propositions like the propositions of mathematics don't seem to come through the senses we don't seem to base them on evidence and testing and experience so the in purses for other stuck as to how to explain them the move forward to make this logical empiricism is the idea that the truths of mathematics and logic are truth by definition the truths in a system so now you must ask of any statement is it meaningful and it's meaningful either because it can be verified and now we have a criterion for meaningful empirical discourse for meaningful factual talk can these statements and by verified them in verify in in a way which parallels that of scientific verification exactly they mean by we can verify statement by observation or experiment basically we must be able to tell what method would we go about using and employing to find out whether this statement is true or false now there are statements that could be verified everything else was either a tautology a pure logic can you give us a couple of them give us an example of a statements can be verified it can be verified and then the other one well suppose you want to know whether the liquid in the in the jar is an acid then you can verify it by testing it with litmus paper and seeing whether the litmus paper turns red if you want to know how many coins are in my pocket you can verify it by turning out my pocket and counting them but if you start to say that all reality is one substance or all reality it's a plurality of substances we've no idea how we'd go about verifying that that's that's not verifiable that's all this particle research about them well particle research is fine because you're using the methods of science and the methods of science have to be ultimately confirmed by the empirical basis you've got to look at the meter readings you've got to use the mathematics but if you're making philosophical claims which are supposed to transcend methods of verification then we don't even know what would make them true so the verification criterion of meaning becomes the kind of key tool to go about analyzing which statements are acceptable which are not and of course statements about ethics religion and so on are not verifiable they become meaningless a why'd you tackle this now at this stage in the discussion it would be to ask each of you as it were to take to take the place of one of the three key people that are three of you here and as you mentioned at the beginning of the program we have three main persons only much many unfair to the others but there's slick and there's no right and this Carnot so if you are Thompson what can start saying what slick because we're not talking about cohesive group they're the logical positivists but I know we know don't know what different people going towards the same end can you tell us what Moritz Schlick what his main driving argument was well Schlick has said earlier sort of had a background in physics he was one of the first philosophers in everywhere really to to write knowledgeably and in fact gaining Einsteins approval for that about the theory of relativity of her special and and and then the general theory of relativity and in Vienna he turned to larger scale epistemological question questions about the theory of knowledge and amongst those three that you've just sort of mentioned slick perhaps was still the most traditionalist so within these cadets kind of revolutionary movement he was the one who was sort of most most most betoken still too and one could say that in first of all in how he himself thought of this new philosophy he thought of that as specifically of trying to make clear what we mean a kind of meaning philosophy as meaning analysis but it was still a distinctive subject philosophy whereas others like Noah Raj basically he didn't even like the word philosophy because he was so important engines and then very specifically they disagreed about what the empirical basis of our scientific knowledge actually was and there all three of them made different proposals and they took different position in the course of a kind of a long debate that basically lasted there the whole extent of of the Vienna circle and unshrink believed ultimately that you could gain knowledge through observation which could be which which would be private it was private of living that's right I mean they all believed that observation was was the key to empirical knowledge but he conceived of those of the basic elements of our knowledge as statements about the content of our our our phenomenal experience what is given to us what appearances we have which precisely as he as he suggested were private and there are certain difficulties attached to that which may be you server them now so what about Nate cutter what about I don't know right well where did as you we stand is wrong word what was his drive what was his contribution to this this group well knowing what made two contributions I think three one was the political push but the the philosophical contributions were in the first place he strongly disagreed with Schlick about what were the what was the bottom line in science he thought that this talk about our inner experiences was a dreadful mistake and that science always started with observations described in the language of physical objects so it's not useful to say I'm having an experience of a red thing it might be useful to say the stop light is red one's a statement about my inner experience and the other is a statement about a physical object in space and time and it it it mattered because norwalk thought you could only build up science from these claims about physical objects and how they behaved in space and time when you and Thomas pointed out earlier that you rejected the whole notion of the idea of there being a philosophy so philosophy didn't count anymore it wasn't in his mind as it were but nevertheless he made two huge contributions to the philosophy of logical positivism and the reason Schlick wanted to go back to experience was the nice thing about science is that it gives us a high degree of certainty and if you begin to look for certainty there is a natural progression to think well I could actually readily be mistaken about whether the stop light was red perhaps I miss saw it perhaps the light was reflecting non-standard circumstances etc but you pull back and say well if I want some certain foundations for science let's go back to something I can really be sure of may I have this red experience now so it was the one of the reasons for - pull back into subjective experience as the basis for science was to try to find some basis that was certain and no I thought that was absolutely mad that you could never build science from those kinds of propositions so you you can't build quantum field theory from reports of red here now which was the kind of experiential report and Mary Mary Smith Rudolf Carnap yes Carnap comes in as the mediator between these two other figures so that you're sitting between this you'll like the mediators are no problem they're listener have carefully this program has been very well constructed so we have this insistence that science is ultimately based on the private experiences and observations of the individual scientists we've got Noah talking about the public language describing physical objects and their properties one of the things I did to mention was that for Noah what was very very important is something that we now stress about science is that it's a public enterprise and division of labor and that you really did need to have all these different activities by all these different scientists doing different jobs but drove you to physical a slightly physical sign that's true but of course Carnap doesn't quite readily give up the idea that philosophy has a role so he thinks they're all it has is in fact to be a logic for describing theories and systems and logic is supposed to give you rigor clarity sharp definition of concepts this is a fantastically good tool to sing what precisely is my theory claiming how's it related to its observational evidential base now karna at this point has a sort of conventional move to reconcile the other two he says we could build a theory that's ultimately talking about as the evidence base experiences and the individual reports but we could just as easily have a theory that talks about physical objects and makes that the basis and the evidential support for the theory and it's a conventional choice which one of these you use if they can both deliver predictions and results both will do so we now introduce this idea that you've got competing theories and another important point of of this he calls it a principle of tolerance he says you know you can build up your theory any way you like from the inside and then you can ask questions about what follows in the theory what is the theory claiming if you stand back and you ask but which of these theories is right or correct now you're asking something quite meaningless there are only questions internal to the theory not questions meaningful questions external to the theory Thomas about the Ludwig Wittgenstein visited the vienna circle in the 1920s what did what did they take from him well they took from Vidkun stein who in 22 and 122 published a famous book the Tractatus logico-philosophicus it's probably one of the most austere philosophy books ever published and they stumbled across that and in fact read it in the group in meetings for a whole a sort of academic year in 1925 and they found in that the key for the problem that made their positivism distinctive as it's also sometimes called made it into logical empiricism maybe they found there the key for solving the problem for how to how to account for our knowledge of logic and mathematics prior to vet can stein still with russell logic was thought of as describing is it were the most abstract laws for the furniture of the universe altogether what Vidkun stein introduced was the idea that logic itself was empty pathologists and the word empty here means it doesn't tell us anything about the world logic tells us for example either it's raining or it's not raining that that is logically true it exhausts the possibilities but it doesn't tell us anything about what the world is like and or and and that was that was the job of logic logic was a calculus to allow us to build statements that had formation rules and then it had transformation rules it showed which statements followed from others and which contradicted each other and therefore our knowledge of knowledge so to speak Cooper was trained or could in some sense he considered knowledge of truths of reason but these truths of reason were precisely again not impaired empirically we're not rules about the world and with this knowledge with this account of logic they were able to say well look we are good in purses we don't we don't need to account for rational intuition to learn about numbers etc because they also believed as Wittgenstein didn't but they added that to vidcon Stein's idea of the tautology is nurse of logic that all of mathematics could be reduced to knowledge to logic that was a program for lodges and they inherited from from Frager and russell berrie smith can return to the area of language now that philosophy came it became a critique of language and logic and not reality can you unravel that place they they believe that there is a job for a philosophy to do but it's the job of logical analysis and logical analysis means that what philosophy amounts to Carnap thought was the logic of science this was this was the only job left for philosophy so you look at science as a set of claims a set of statements trying to make hypotheses about the way the world works claims about what we observe and you have to make those claims rigorous logically well-structured you have to show how certain observational statements are predicted or follow from theoretical statements you have to show how you how internally consistent your theory is so you're using a study of the meanings of words and the meanings of theoretical scientific language to be the only philosophy that's left it's logical analysis now this of course means that in areas like ethics we're going to claim that ethical statements that it's wrong to steal money or it's good to be kind to one's neighbor these are not empirically provable statements nor are the logical tautologies so they end up being meaningless but now what we can do is we can say well let's analyze the language of ethics let's do a linguistic analysis and say what does this ethical talk mean and they come up with a new view in fact Freddy arey Jair comes up with a new view that we shouldn't see ethical words as describing the world we should see them as expressing our feelings they're our way of indicating our attitudes and inclinations our emotions if you're stealing is wrong is not a is not a not a fact it's an opinion it's an opinion and it's an opinion I tried to convince you of and a Jair who had this emotivist theory of ethical statements developed eventually by Stevenson says we could just as well say you stole that in a shark to an avoider so when we say it's wrong we're saying I disapprove and it was just saying that it's often called the Booher all theory so you stole something boo you like kindness your kind Jara so this is the parody of the view mainly that when you utter it's wrong or it's right you're just giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to what actually happened can we just push this a bit further Nancy can you give us an example of the sort of process a logical positivist ever there's no pure look we know they're different people you have three of you expressed different views on of the different we never know what would he go through to to get let's call it to secure starting point I mean the secure starting point for a theologian would be a belief in God that that is ago that's a secure starting point Aquinas would have a customer that's where I start from and and similarly through other other you probably wouldn't call them disciplines areas of knowledge what's the secure starting point for a logical positivist well I'm sorry but there are three positions secure starting point for Schlick would be a report of your own experience that can't go wrong maybe you can't get very far starting with that secure starting point but you know how could you be mistaken that you are having a read experience now you've just proved you just said Lu you could be mistaken well that's no watts of you and it's my view but it wasn't Schlitz Felix that once you've retreated in the subjective experience it's secure the joy Walt's view was that nothing is secure that you have observation reports and you have to use the language and the concepts that you have at the moment and you have to use the methods that you have at the moment and you have to make you bet about what are the best methods and what are the things that you are most secure in and he used this metaphor of we're like sailors having to rebuild our ships at sea and never able to put into drydock and build from a firm foundation so Noel thought you do have to have test your claims and make them consistent with your observations but you're never secure that your observations are right and even your observations might have been wrong and you've got to start rebuilding so no one said no secure starting points and as I understand Carnap karna said well you can choose a set of claims that you're going to hold constant for the moment and look to see what that body of theory is surrounding those but the choice it's more like the Neue of you the choice there is going to be conventional Thomas your traditional philosophers fighting back at this point or did deed logical positive just sweep away all other systems they did people say we've just something revolutionaries happen we must have abandon all traditional ways of thinking and and join in no they did they did sort of fight back depending depending on what place and what what what time were sort of talking about in Austria and Germany for related sort of movements like the Berlin Society for empirical philosophy they fought back by simply ejecting them saying sending them into exile if they were lucky because political developments were such that you know under Nazism that kind of science evidence based reasoning was just utterly opposed by the by the authorities could contradicted what they were sort of claiming the Viennese Circle was was was dispersed dispersed more it was the impact of great number of them which is connected what they thought as well they were socialists they weren't just Jews there were Jews and socialists and remember they're sweeping away large tracts of German philosophy which were very important so look so that's what happened there but what about France for instance with they they saying we're not having anything to do well France there was for a while a sort of an opening for them they had a very big international calling conference there in in 1935 unity of science conference but it's the recent research suggests that in fact no rot who was always the one who who initiated these contacts was talking to the wrong people and they fell between the cracks of sort of internecine Parisian intellectual warfare so they didn't get too far they're been in England of course they had a spokesman in a gar who's somewhat simplified their set of doctrines but certainly put it out and air being you know promoting the doctrine with is youthful the sort of enthusiasm obviously took great fight into taking on all comers and some then I hope to establish an Oxford group didn't language truth and logic was a error went for four months to Vienna in 3233 he came back and began to gather a group of discussions and Isaiah Berlin's rooms and all souls there was a core group of seven a bit like the vienna circle a core group of seven that met weekly and discussed the ideas of essentially logical positivism among other things and as in vienna they all were progressive left-wing they tended to be anti appeasement and were almost all of them involved in the labor government and a kind of socialist leaning activities after the war and to push on a bit we went to America too as well didn't it Barry yes it did I mean when this dispersant they literally went to America for research some of them went to the UK someone went to America but and again had a big impact on the merchants that had a huge impact you have you have the view that becomes very prominent I think at that time in the US that philosophy of science is philosophy enough that if you're doing philosophy of science you're doing something it's making a real contribution that other things you'd really fall away you've got the development of logic which Carnac continues to develop but you've also got young philosophers of science coming through people like Klein who set up out a generation of new philosophers of science and create new problems taking the ideas forward disagreeing with what came before but it's it's this that actually shapes what we call the anglo-american tradition and especially the analytic tradition in philosophy you mentioned coin he is it it's pretty simplistic I'm not too sorry about this but he is it were attacked logical positivism didn't he did but I think you can't understand coin unless you see that his attack is a way of cleaning the stable so that empiricism can go on he thought they were mistaken he thought they were committed to dogmas he thought one of the dogmas was that every statement was either analytic and synthetic and he thinks actually this division between you know facts about the world and facts about meaning is not very robust in fact they bleed into each other there's no clear distinction and the other thing he rejects is the idea that we can ground our theoretical statements on observations and experience he says that our statements must face the tribunal of experience as a corporate body as a whole briefly I mean there's a lot more to say and I just tip of iceberg sir but still can you briefly tell me what influence you think this has had on sorters generally in since the nineteen twenties and thirties well I think while it it's not her sort of a live project in analytic philosophy now it very much has set up its ideals of clarity and making testable justifiable and least knowledge claims and to render philosophy in some sense scientific I mean at the moment I think we see an analytic philosophy still a strong sort of counter reaction to it so thirty years ago somebody said well logical positivism is about as dead a philosophical movement as it ever will be but in a certain sense it's sort of it's that they're sort of the Living Dead on the one hand they're they're still being invoked by contemporary philosophers whenever they want to put forward their current theories or something which they they they they reject and want to do better with and on the other hand much recent research in the history of analytic philosophy has shown that indeed what what this program will have brought out that the logical positivists were not as homogeneous as they often portrayed would actually give you this wide variety of positions some of which anticipate its later overcoming I think that they were also part of movement I don't know whether they I don't want to say they were the cause of it but they were the spokespeople for a movement to tsiyon ties the study of society so that the idea that you were silent izing philosophy was only a part of it they were silent izing the study of society and they were conceived along with the idea that you could construct a better society by evidence-based policy which is all the rage at the moment and finally in briefly I'm sorry Barry Posner yes I think they've changed the idea that philosophy has its own subject matter instead philosophies a second-order discipline it's the philosophy of science of mathematics of biology and so on so we're making a contribution as it were to the methodology we don't do work on our own to create new doctrines well thank you very much indeed or bring you that down to us

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Positivism, Empiricism, Logical Positivism, Logical Empiricism, Logicism, Vienna Circle, Verificationism, Philosophy of Language, Foundationalism, Rudolf Carnap, Wittgenstein, Epistemology, Theory of Knowledge, Moritz Schlick, A. J. Ayer, Phenomenalism, Physicalism, Reductionism, Philosophy of Science, Theory of Meaning, Logic, Neurath, Carnap, Emotivism, Analytic-Synthetic, Conceptual Analysis, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Tractatus, Analytic Philosophy

Id: 8Llkuvr1qnU

Length: 41min 35sec (2495 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2016