logical positivism, also known as logical or scientific empiricism, modern school of philosophy that attempted to introduce the methodology and precision of mathematics and the natural sciences into the field of philosophy. The movement, which began in the early 20th cent., was the fountainhead of the modern trend that considers philosophy an analytical, rather than a speculative, inquiry. It began in the group called the Vienna Circle, which formed around Moritz Schlick when he occupied (1920s) a chair of philosophy at the Univ. of Vienna. Among its members were the philosophers Friedrich Waismann, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Victor Kraft, and the mathematicians Hans Hahn, Carl Menger, and Kurt Gödel. The movement soon had a widespread following in Europe and the United States. Among those philosophers whose work was influenced by the Vienna Circle are A. J. Ayer Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules (ā`ər, âr), 1910–89, British philosopher, b. London, grad. Oxford, 1932.
..... Click the link for more information. and Gilbert Ryle Ryle, Gilbert, 1900–1976, British philosopher. A graduate of Oxford, he became a tutor at Christ Church, Oxford, and later was Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy (1945–68) there.
..... Click the link for more information. . The position of the original logical positivists was a blend of the positivism of Ernst Mach Mach, Ernst (ĕrnst mäkh), 1838–1916, Austrian physicist and philosopher, b. Moravia.
..... Click the link for more information. with the logical concepts of Gottlob Frege Frege, Gottlob (gôt`lōp frā`gə), 1848–1925, German philosopher and mathematician.
..... Click the link for more information. and Bertrand Russell Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3d Earl, 1872–1970, British philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer, b. Trelleck, Wales.
..... Click the link for more information. , but their inspiration was derived from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (loŏt`vĭkh yō`zĕf yō`hän vĭt`gənshtīn)
..... Click the link for more information. , who lived for a time near Vienna, and G. E. Moore Moore, George Edward, 1873–1958, English philosopher, b. Upper Norwood. He was educated at Cambridge, where he was a fellow (1898–1904) and then a lecturer (1911–25) in the department of moral sciences.
..... Click the link for more information. . The Vienna Circle in general subscribed to Wittgenstein's dictum in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that the object of philosophy was the logical clarification of thought; philosophy was not a theory but an activity. The logical positivists made a concerted effort to clarify the language of science by showing that the content of scientific theories could be reduced to truths of logic and mathematics coupled with propositions referring to sense experience. They held that metaphysical speculation was nonsensical, propositions of logic and mathematics tautological, and moral or value statements merely emotive. They championed the highly influential verification principle, from which it follows that a proposition has meaning only if some sense experience would suffice to determine its truth. The Vienna Circle disintegrated after the Nazis took control of Austria in the late 1930s. The influence of the movement, as a movement, ended c.1940. However, the concepts of the movement, particularly in its emphasis on the function of philosophy as the analysis of language, has been carried on throughout the West.

Bibliography

See A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (1959, repr. 1966); E. Gellner, Words and Things (rev. ed. 1968, repr. 1979).

logical positivism

Early school of analytic philosophy, inspired by David Hume, the mathematical logic of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1921). The school, formally instituted at the University of Vienna in a seminar of Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) in 1922, continued there as the Vienna Circle until 1938. It proposed several revolutionary theses: (1) All meaningful discourse consists either of (a) the formal sentences of logic and mathematics or (b) the factual propositions of the special sciences; (2) Any assertion that claims to be factual has meaning only if it is possible to say how it might be verified; (3) Metaphysical assertions, including the pronouncements of religion, belong to neither of the two classes of (1) and are therefore meaningless. Some logical positivists, notably A.J. Ayer, held that assertions in ethics (e.g., “It is wrong to steal”) do not function logically as statements of fact but only as expressions of the speaker's feelings of approval or disapproval toward some action. See also Rudolf Carnap; emotivism; verifiability principle.