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A review by socraticgadfly
The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle by David Edmonds
5.0
I have previously read "Wittgenstein's Poker," "Rousseau's Dog," and "Would You Kill the Fat Man," as well as suggesting to Edmonds that his next book should be about Koestler punching Camus. (Yes, that too happened!)
This is a tad ahead of "Wittgenstein's Poker" for his best book.
That's for several reasons.
One is that it has a solid overview of the Vienna Circle, including its "satellites" in Prague and Berlin, and its acolytes such as Ayer in Britain and Quine in the US.
Second is that Edmonds is a bit more puckish here than in some of this other writings.
Third is that he clearly makes Vienna a "character" in the book. (I've read one other book, about fin de siecle Vienna, with the rise of Freud, the exile of Lenin and Trotsky, etc., that did similar.)
Related is that Edmonds had relatives in 1930s Vienna. Fortunately, they all escaped.
Fourth is related to the first, in talking about the ties of Wittgenstein and Popper to the Circle. Popper comes off, overall, as losing a bit more luster. (He in later life claimed not to be a member of the Circle, but at and around the time of writing "The Open Society," when not so famous, claimed he WAS a member.)
That said, at five stars, I offer a complaint, and specifically, about the "dramatis personae" at the end, in an epilogue. The snarky entry for Tarski is rude. And it ignores that a lot of the ideas about self-reference and many related matters that many educated people attribute to Gödel actually come from Tarski, namely, ideas in Tarski's undefinability theorem. Gödel partially wrote about some of them, but only really within the world of mathematics. Tarski extended this to language and made the concepts much broader.
Ideally, this is 4.5 stars, within the concept of Edmonds' approach and related issues.
This is a tad ahead of "Wittgenstein's Poker" for his best book.
That's for several reasons.
One is that it has a solid overview of the Vienna Circle, including its "satellites" in Prague and Berlin, and its acolytes such as Ayer in Britain and Quine in the US.
Second is that Edmonds is a bit more puckish here than in some of this other writings.
Third is that he clearly makes Vienna a "character" in the book. (I've read one other book, about fin de siecle Vienna, with the rise of Freud, the exile of Lenin and Trotsky, etc., that did similar.)
Related is that Edmonds had relatives in 1930s Vienna. Fortunately, they all escaped.
Fourth is related to the first, in talking about the ties of Wittgenstein and Popper to the Circle. Popper comes off, overall, as losing a bit more luster. (He in later life claimed not to be a member of the Circle, but at and around the time of writing "The Open Society," when not so famous, claimed he WAS a member.)
That said, at five stars, I offer a complaint, and specifically, about the "dramatis personae" at the end, in an epilogue. The snarky entry for Tarski is rude. And it ignores that a lot of the ideas about self-reference and many related matters that many educated people attribute to Gödel actually come from Tarski, namely, ideas in Tarski's undefinability theorem. Gödel partially wrote about some of them, but only really within the world of mathematics. Tarski extended this to language and made the concepts much broader.
Ideally, this is 4.5 stars, within the concept of Edmonds' approach and related issues.