![]() ![]() ![]() They settled in the Anglophone countries in the period between the wars: most of them were refugees from Continental fascism, and for many positivism was an ideology, a political weapon that revealed fascism as irrational mystification, strictly meaningless, and certainly unscientific. However, there were crucial differences between Feyerabend and his Viennese predecessors. With Viktor Kraft he helped to found the Kraft Circle as a continuation of the Vienna Circle. footnote * As his autobiography tells us, he grew up in Vienna, in a lower middle-class home, and as a young man, though brought up a Catholic, espoused some sort of logical positivism. One of the latest and greatest of these thinkers was Paul Feyerabend. They in fact testify to a long and strong link between England and Vienna, and in particular between English philosophy and the Vienna Circle: the philosophical link of a common empiricism and positivism and a conviction that science can be justified, and indeed proves its meaningfulness and rationality, by its embodiment of the empirical method. Most of these philosophers came to speak and write English almost as if native to that tongue. In a period when Anglophone philosophy has been represented as isolated from the European mainland, philosophy in England, America, and Australia in the twentieth century has in fact been remarkably invigorated and decisively shaped by Continental émigrés, beginning with Wittgenstein and including Carnap and Popper. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |