Repository | Book | Chapter

Moritz Schlick is generally recognised as the founder and presiding genius of the Vienna Circle from its foundation in the mid-1920s until his death in 1936. However, he remains a somewhat shadowy figure, an uninsistent, gentlemanly presence, obscured by the computer-like Carnap, the burly, combative Reichenbach and the truculently partisan Neurath. It was he, together with Waismann, who established the connection between the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein and did most to maintain it, since Wittgenstein soon made it clear that these were the only members of the circle he was prepared to talk to. The price, or at any rate consequence, of this concession was that Schlick, like Waismann, by obediently adopting Wittgenstein's opinions in all essentials, was absorbed almost without trace into Wittgenstein's intellectual atmosphere, and came to be understood, and to some extent to be, no more than a channel through which Wittgenstein's ideas were communicated to a wider public. If Schlick's close involvement with Wittgenstein never took on the rather ghastly quality of Waismann's, that of glove-puppet to controlling hand, that may have been because of Schlick's comparatively early death.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-5442-7_9

Full citation: