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, by Karl Sigmund
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Product details
File Size: 62813 KB
Print Length: 464 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (December 5, 2017)
Publication Date: December 5, 2017
Sold by: Hachette Book Group
Language: English
ASIN: B06XZJGX2W
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The book by Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demanding Times, is a singular contribution to understanding the Vienna Circle. I recall reading Ayer back in the 1950s and trying to see this school of philosophy as an adjunct to scientific understanding. The mix of Mach, Wittgenstein, and others presented an alternative view of philosophical understandings. Having been educated in the scholastic metaphysical world, but becoming an Ockhamist as I became more technically educated, I was attracted to this collection of minds as they exchanged their ideas.Sigmund brings each of them to life, for better or worse. Having lived in Prague and travelling frequently to Vienna I often wondered how this group met, managed their flow of ideas, and in many ways transformed the way we think. I saw Vienna in the 21st Century as no reflection of what it had been during the time of the Vienna Circle.Remnants of their influence are in Popper, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and to a degree even in Russel. Sigmund brings all of these people together in a highly readable and logical manner. One begins to better understand the group.Atoms exist! This was the first battle that set the groundwork for the ideas that came forth. Sigmund does a brilliant job of bringing this to the fore. It was Einstein in 1905 in his paper on Brownian motion who put forth the model that allowed for the calculation of the number of atoms in a mole, the Avogadro number. For Einstein, by the power of thought, he was able to set forth a theory whose demonstration would yield a verifiable Avogadro's number. Then using this Sigmund (see p 47) can weld together the battle between Mach and Boltzmann, which pre-dated Einstein and his brilliance, and which was between the disbeliever in the atom and the believer.Mach was in his disbelief in the atom a paradigm of the 19th century physicist, whose understanding of thermodynamics, such as enthalpy and Gibbs Free energy were constructs based on gross properties of a collective mass without any underlying structure. It was then Boltzmann whose understanding of the atom developed what we have in statistical thermodynamics based on fundamental physical constructs secured in the reality of the atom. Mach had to relent, almost. But the ability to predict and then measure, using what could be seen, became a cornerstone to the principals in this group. Sigmund does a splendid job of exposing this change and in doing so by explaining each individual and their interactions.Sigmund then in Chapter 4 starts the beginning of the Circle. The players such as Neurath and Hahn, post WW I characters which made for the flavor of post war Vienna. Then he introduces Schlick, whose participation will catalyze the Circle. Schlick was one who managed to bridge the world of Kant and Einstein, of the metaphysical and real. Schlick and Einstein struck up a friendship which helped both (see p 102). Schlick started the Circle, if such be the case, with the ability to idolize and promote such figures as Einstein, Hilbert, Planck and Russell (see p 108). Sigmund does a wonderful job in bringing all of these elements out in a highly readable and well flowing manner. Unlike many authors who present facts in an assaulting staccato manner, Sigmund presents his characters and their interactions and contributions in a symphonic manner, one building upon the other. That is what makes this a joy to read.The discussion by Sigmund on Heidegger on pp 156-157 is superb. It is the discussion of Heidegger and "the nothing". He does allude to the Davos lectures and does not mention the Cassirer debate of 1929. That would have been useful but perhaps a bit afar from the Circle discussions as Sigmund has them evolve.The discussions on the work of Neurath and Red Vienna and their use of images for propaganda purposes was also quite enlightening (see pp 180-181). This clearly was a blending of the Wittgenstein "picture theory" of language and the beginning of semiotic theory. Neurath exults pictures as a means to communicate, to propagandize, and Sigmund uses this as a sounding board for the Wittgenstein theories.On pp 210-212 the discussion of the excluded middle opens the door for Godel. Sigmund moves from physics, to philosophy to mathematics to logic, and back again, but the flow is smooth and connected.The best sentence in the book is on p 262:"A former schoolmate of Ludwig Wittgenstein had become the chancellor of Germany and he had no intention of stopping with this."This is the opening sentence but it lays out all that is happening at this time. No six degrees of separation in Vienna, brilliance and savagery often found themselves in the same coffeehouse.On p 294 there is the one and only mention of A J Ayer, the Brit whose works managed to popularize the Circle as well as its logical positivism. It would have been useful to have expanded this discussion a bit more for those of us whose initial introduction was through Ayer.In the later chapters Sigmund introduces Popper and Kuhn, Popper and his falsification construct and Kuhn and his paradigms. He also provides details on Godel up to his death, from starvation.Overall this is a brilliant work and worth reading for anyone interested in the intellectual culture of the first half of the twentieth century. This is Vienna when there were coffee houses and collections of intellectuals. To repeat, Sigmund has created a symphonic approach to blending the collection of intellects who circled one another at this time. This is one of the best descriptions of this place and time.
In the 1920s and 30s, a small group of philosophers, social scientists (although the title as we understand it did not exist then) and mathematicians met for a weekly discussion in a small room at the University of Vienna. The group called themselves the Vienna Circle and their goal was nothing less than to place philosophy on a firm scientific basis and exorcise it of its metaphysical, unscientific propositions. They called their philosophy logical positivism, and their patron saints were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Karl Menger and others were the founders and leading lights. Kurt Gödel was a frequent member while Karl Popper seemed to have carried out an unconsummated yearning to join the group.Mathematician Karl Sigmund tells the story of the Vienna Circle well in his book. It’s a mixed bag. On one hand, Sigmund is often quite good at capturing the milieu of Vienna between the wars and explaining the agenda of the circle. Turn of the century Vienna was an intellectual paradise. In spite of the looming crises effected by the forces of monarchism, anarchism and European power plays, Vienna in particular was a hotbed of activity in philosophy, physics, art, literature and psychology. Conversations in the famous Viennese cafes could go on for hours late into the night, with coffee mugs and equations littering the marble tables. Freud was revolutionizing the study of the unconscious, and Klimt was doing the same with art. David Hilbert - while not Viennese, a frequent visitor - was trying to axiomatize all of mathematics; Bertrand Russell was trying to do the same thing in England. The book treads on this territory crisply.Sigmund is also good at laying out the life and times of select thinkers of the era, including Ernst Mach who inspired the circle and Albert Einstein whose theories were enthusiastically propounded by its members. Wittgenstein was close to a demigod for the circle. He had made the limitations of philosophy apparent in his dense, sometimes profound, sometimes empty-sounding book Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. His famous last statement, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silentâ€, was a rallying cry for several members of the Vienna Circle who took Wittgenstein’s maxim to mean that in order to verify one must often simply show something. In his work Wittgenstein had emphasized the so-called ‘picture theory of language’, and it seemed to apply well to the Vienna Circle's agenda: if you can actually see something it's very likely to be true. Wittgenstein was one of the strangest, most unpleasant and most egoistic men who ever lived (Freeman Dyson thought that ultimately, when his work had been subjected to critical analysis, he was a charlatan), and he rarely deigned to make contact with the circle except through one or two members. But the circle members sought to faithfully apply his philosophy not only in science but also in art and economics; for instance Neurath invented isotype, a way to communicate quantitative information rapidly through icons.One of the most ironic facts about the circle was that even as they applauded Russell and Hilbert’s programs to put all of mathematics (and possibly philosophy) on a firm axiomatic basis, they carried within their own ranks a subversive. In 1931, Kurt Gödel showed through his famous incompleteness theorems that Russell and Hilbert’s dream was doomed and that any consistent system of mathematics will always have axiomatically unprovable true statements in it. Interestingly, none of the members seem to have grasped the monumental significance of Gödel’s discovery for their own program; I suspect this was partly because almost no one seems to have possessed the mathematical firepower required to understand the details. Gödel himself was not the type to enthusiastically publicize his ideas, and only Johnny von Neumann seems to have understood their revolutionary nature when he first presented them.All of the activities of the Vienna Circle were carried out even as the world around them was gradually descending into “demented timesâ€. While Sigmund does capture what was going on, I wish he had dwelt in more detail on the rise of the Nazis. It was one of the denizens of this crazy world, a frustrated philosophy student who was actually demented and who was jealous of an imaginary affair between his muse and Moritz Schlick, who finally shot and killed Schlick in 1936. By that time Hitler had already acquired power, and many of the circle’s Jewish members were wrapping up and fleeing. The circle disintegrated. Gödel who was not Jewish and was Austrian was still about to be conscripted into the German army when he became a German citizen because of the Anschluss; it was John von Neumann who likely saved his life by appealing to high authorities in the US and inviting him to a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.While informative, the book is uneven and sometimes frustrating to read, partly because there are so many ideas discussed in here whose significance is not clear, partly because Sigmund seems intent on inserting short biographies of even minor members of the group, and partly because much of the text seems to be translated literally from German into English (albeit with some help from Douglas Hofstadter). While this makes some of the writing witty and insightful, it can also make it opaque, maddeningly vague. As it stands, the narrative is a hodgepodge of different ideas and events about a magical time that is unlikely to materialize anytime soon. Ultimately the significance and legacy of the Vienna Circle is not entirely clear. Among its members, only Gödel reached the ranks of the most rarefied thinkers; Popper who also became well-known only ran circles around the circle. Others like the logician Rudolf Carnap or the mathematician Karl Menger (father of one of my graduate school professors) had productive and influential careers abroad, but this did not make the circle anywhere to being the equivalent of Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum. As far as I can tell, logical positivism does not feature prominently in today's philosophy classrooms.However, the circle did make one enduring contribution. In striving to constantly strip philosophy and thinking in general of messy and unrigorous paraphernalia, it urged everyone to keep on making rationality the centerpiece of their thinking. Especially in retrospect, when one considers the irrational madness which the world descended into during that time, this fact alone makes the Vienna Circle during its brief tenure a shining candle in the dark.
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