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systematic effort to interpret the elements of sensory stimulation and
linguistic construction that are involved in the discovery of true state–
ments about the world.
Karl Popper, unlike Ayer and Quine, was born in Vienna and studied
philosophy with many who were members of the Vienna Circle. Also
unlike Ayer and Quine, he was never an apostle or follower of logical
positivism but was afforded, virtually at the creation, special status as the
"official opposition" of the Vienna Circle. In his latest book,
In Search
oj a Better World,
a collection of pieces written over the past three
decades, about a third of the essays relate to the work Popper carried
out in his study and confrontation of logical positivism. Another third,
as the title suggests, refer to his concern with social and political change.
Popper also explores his reassessment of and, in a sense, his self-definition
within, the cultural heritage of earlier Viennese and European liberalism.
The appearance of these works now, some time after the main texts
of the founders of logical positivism - Wittgenstein, Carnap, Schlick,
Waismann, Neurath, Reichenbach, et al - have suffered a measure of
eclipse, reminds us of their common context and the shared source of
their philosophical development. Even as they provide sign posts for new
directions in philosophy at the end of the century, they have unavoidably
given us testaments of survivors who have been left to tell the tale: Ayer
in a style influenced by the British empiricist tradition, from Locke
through Hume and Mill to Bertrand Russell; Quine with elegant prose
whose laconicism mirrors the precision and nonredundancy of a logical
language; and ·Popper by giving us a sort of philosophical fuilleton with
an air of personal authority, championing the broad legacy of the secular
European Enlightenment.
Viewed from the perspective of today's cultural currents, the tale of
logical positivism is the record of a doctrine whose coherence and
magnetism, in the philosophical void of interwar Europe, attracted the
best philosophical minds of a generation to an extreme and untraditional
vision of the future of philosophy. The Nazi attack on this movement in
the 1930s resulted in the exile of virtually all of its major figures. As a
consequence of their relocation from Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to
Oxford, Cambridge, London, Chicago, Wellington, Ankara, Jerusalem,
Los Angeles, New York, Rostov, Minneapolis, Columbus, and more
remote or provincial campuses, logical positivism became, for a period,
the dominant philosophical movement of the Anglo-American academy.
Yet its history reflects much more than the ebb and flow of intellec–
tual trends in the cultural wars of our times. It was a response, as the
two component terms of its hybrid name was intended to suggest, to
