Introduction
 Table of
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Verifiability
Principle  |
1. Introduction.
Also known as logical empiricism and
neo-positivism, this philosophical school was born
in Austria and Germany during the 1920s, and was
primarily concerned with the logical analysis of
scientific knowledge. Among its members were Moritz
Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf
Carnap, the leading exponent of logical positivism,
Hans Reichenbach, the founder of the Berlin Circle,
Alfred Jules Ayer, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank,
Kurt Grelling, Hans Hahn, Carl Gustav Hempel,
Victor Kraft, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich
Waismann.
Logical positivists denied the soundness of
metaphysics and traditional philosophy; they
asserted that many philosophical problems are
indeed meaningless.
During the 1930s, when Nazism gained power in
Germany, the most prominent proponents of logical
positivism immigrated to the United States, where
they considerably influenced American philosophy.
Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading
school in the philosophy of science. Nowadays, the
influence of logical positivism persists especially
in the way philosophy is practiced. This influence
is particularly noticeable in the attention
philosophers give to the analysis of scientific
thought and to the integration of results from
technical research on formal logic and the theory
of probability.
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Table of
contents |
Verifiability
Principle |