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Vienna
Circle
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From the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, this article is an excellent
introduction to the philosophy and philosophers of the Vienna
Circle.
Excerpt:
Group of philosophers who gathered round Moritz
Schlick, after his
coming in Vienna in 1922. They organized a philosophical association,
named Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Association). However, meetings on
philosophy of science and epistemology began as early as 1907, promoted
by Frank, Hahn and Neurath, who later arranged to bring Schlick at the
University of Vienna. Among Vienna Circle's members were M. Schlick, R.
Carnap, H. Feigl, P. Frank, K. Gödel, H. Hahn, V. Kraft, O. Neurath, F.
Waismann. Also K. R. Popper and H. Kelsen had many contacts with the
Vienna Circle, although they did not belong to it. At the meetings was
also discussed Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and there were several
meetings between Wittgenstein, Schlick, Waismann and Carnap. In 1929
Hahn, Neurath and Carnap published the manifesto of the circle: Wissenschaftliche
Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (A scientific world-view. The
Vienna Circle).
Vienna Circle was very active in advertising the new philosophical
ideas of logical positivism. Several congresses on epistemology and
philosophy of science were organized, with the help of the Berlin
Circle. There were some preparatory congresses: Prague (1929), Könisberg
(1930), Prague (1934) and then the first congress on scientific
philosophy held in Paris (1935), followed by congresses in Copenhagen
(1936), Paris (1937), Cambridge, England (1938), Cambridge, Mass.
(1939). The Könisberg congress (1930) was very important, for Gödel
announced he has proved the completeness of first order logic and the
incompleteness of arithmetic. Another very interesting congress was the
one held in Copenhagen (1936), which was dedicated to quantum physics
and causality...
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Society for the Advancement of the Scientific
World View.
The
international Institute Vienna Circle, a nonprofit society founded in
Vienna in October 1991, has set the following goals, documentation and
further contributions to the development of the 'Vienna Circle' in the
areas of science and adult education; and secondly to cultivate and
apply logical empiricism, critical rationalism and linguistic analysis
in the sense of a scientific philosophy and coordinated with general
socio-cultural developments.
An important goal of this effort is the democratization of knowledge and
of science understood as a process of enlightenment in contrast to
irrationalism, dogmatism and fundamentalism in any social setting, but
in cooperation with developments of research.
Site
Includes:
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From the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive
Excerpt:
Philipp Frank (1884 - 1966) obtained a doctorate from Vienna working
under Boltzmann.
He worked on a wide range of topics, calculus of variations, Fourier
series, function spaces, geometrical optics, Schrödinger
wave mechanics and relativity.
Frank was a life long friend of both von Mises
and Einstein.
He loved philosophy of science and his ideas influenced Einstein.
On Einstein's
recommendation he succeeded him to the chair of theoretical physics in
Prague. In 1947 Frank wrote an excellent biography Einstein: His
Life and Times .
Click here for Books by and
about Philipp Frank and the Vienna Circle
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From the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive
Excerpt:
Kurt Gödel (1906 - 1978) proved fundamental results about axiomatic
systems, proving the Undecidability Theorems .
Kurt Gödel attended school in Brünn, completing his school studies
in 1923. His brother Rudolf Gödel said:-
Even in High School my brother was somewhat more one-sided than
me and to the astonishment of his teachers and fellow pupils had
mastered university mathematics by his final Gymnasium years. ...
Mathematics and languages ranked well above literature and history. At
the time it was rumoured that in the whole of his time at High School
not only was his work in Latin always given the top marks but that he
had made not a single grammatical error.
Kurt entered the University of Vienna in 1923. He was taught by
Furtwängler,
Hahn,
Wirtinger, Menger,
Helly
and others. As an undergraduate he took part in a seminar run by Schlick
which studied Russell's
book Introduction to mathematical philosophy. Olga Tausky-Todd,
a fellow student of Gödel's, wrote:-
It became slowly obvious that he would stick with logic, that he
was to be Hahn's
student and not Schlick's, that he was incredibly talented. His help
was much in demand.
He completed his doctoral dissertation under Hahn's
supervision in 1929 and became a member of the faculty of the University
of Vienna in 1930, where he belonged to the school of logical positivism
until 1938....
Other Sites:
 | Kurt Gödel Society -- The Kurt
Gödel Society is an international organization for the
promotion of research in the areas of Logic, Philosophy,
History of
Mathematics,
above all in connection with the biography
of Kurt Gödel, and in other areas to which Gödel made
contributions, especially mathematics, physics, theology, philosophy
- Kurt Gödel was part of the so-called 'Schlick circle', the core
of the Vienna Circle,
as he was a member of the faculty of the University of Vienna-, and Leibniz
studies. |
Click here for books by and
about Kurt Gödel and the Vienna Circle
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From the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive
Excerpt:
Hans Hahn (1879 - 1934) was a student at the Technische
Hochschule in Vienna. There he formed a close friendship with three
other students of mathematics, Paul Ehrenfest,
Heinrich Tietze
and Herglotz. They were known as the 'inseparable four'.
He also studied in Strasbourg, Munich and Göttingen. He was
appointed to the teaching staff in Vienna in 1905 and he became
professor of mathematics there in 1921. In session 1905-06 Hahn
substituted for Otto Stolz
at Innsbruck.
Hahn was a pioneer in set theory and functional analysis and is best
remembered for the Hahn-Banach
theorem. He also made important contributions to the calculus of
variations, developing ideas of Weierstrass.
Click here for books by and
about Hans Hahn and the Vienna Circle.
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| Karl
Menger
From the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive
Excerpt:
Karl Menger (1902 - 1985) attended the Doblinger Gymnasium in
Vienna (1913-1920) where one of his fellow students was Pauli.
Karl entered the University of Vienna in 1920 to study physics. However Hahn
became a lecturer in Vienna in 1921 and Menger attended a course he gave
on What's new concerning the concept of a curve.
Menger became interested in the topic and was encouraged by Hahn to
work on the topic. Menger's work led him to a definition of dimension
independently of Urysohn,
however Urysohn
had died in a drowning accident before he could publish his work and
Menger was not aware of it.
After a severe lung disease which forced Menger to spend more than a
year in a sanatorium, he returned with important papers he had written
on dimension while in the sanatorium and completed his doctorate in
1924.
Other sites:
| Menger's
Sponge -- Menger's Sponge Menger's sponge (sometimes wrongly called Sierpinski's Sponge) is a fractal solid that can be described as follows. Take a cube, divide it into 27 = 3 x 3 x 3 smaller cubes of the same size and remove the cube... |
Click here for books by and
about Karl Menger and the Vienna Circle.
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