BOOKS
153
Beyond the Vienna Circle
THE MEANING OF LIFE. By A.
J.
Ayer.
Charles Scribner's Sons.
$19.95.
IN SEARCH OF A BETTER WORLD. By Karl Popper.
Routledge. $29.95.
PURSUIT OF TRUTH. By W. V. Quine.
Harvard University Press.
$23.50.
Few movements in the history of philosophy have developed the in–
tellectual magnetism and achieved the academic dominance that logical
positivism did, at its zenith in the 1930s and 1940s. Even fewer have so
rapidly and completely lost their place as a participant in the philosophi–
cal dialogue or sustained such a diminution of their intellectual legacy as
did logical positivism in the ensuing two decades. Now, we have new
volumes of thought by three of the major philosophers who were closely
associated with the founding fathers of the movement,
A.
J.
Ayer, W. V.
Quine, and Karl Popper. The work of each bears witness in different
fashion to the original power of the vision and the technique that
characterized the rise of logical positivism and to the reasons for its death
or transformation.
A.
J.
Ayer's book, with its ironically confessional title essay, "The
Meaning of Life," was published posthumously in 1990. Ayer made his
first pilgrimage to Vienna in 1934, at the suggestion of his Oxford tutor,
Gilbert Ryle, and of Isaiah Berlin. He became the only British member
of the Vienna Circle, the small, then relatively unknown group of math–
ematicians, philosophers and scientists at whose weekly seminars the main
doctrines of logical positivism were developed. After his return to
England, Ayer's lucid version of these doctrines sealed his reputation as
the apostle of the movement.
W. V. Quine first met Ayer in 1934 when he read a paper for the
Circle in Vi enna, where he had come as a post-doctoral fellow after
studying with Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. He was to be the
only American member of the Vienna Circle, and he soon followed
Rudolf Carnap, in many ways the leading figure of logical positivism, to
Prague, where he became Carnap's student, colleague, and ultimately,
critic. Yet despite, or perhaps more correctly, pursuant to, his later self–
declared "apostasy" toward the "dogmas" of logical positivism, Quine's
philosophical method and themes remain continuous with those of the
logical positivists. His recent book,
Pursuit of Truth,
represents a
