The last Viennese polymath
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The last Viennese polymath Jordi Cat & Adam Tamas Tuboly (eds.): Neurath reconsidered: new sources and perspectives. Cham: Springer, 2019, xiii + 707 pp, 92.29 € (HB) Tomáš Hříbek1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Until half a century ago, the Austrian philosopher and social scientist Otto Neurath (1882–1945) was remembered as hardly more than the principal author of the 1929 manifesto of the Vienna Circle and the inventor of a vivid metaphor, the so-called Neurath’s ship, later adopted by Quine. Neurath’s fortunes have started to turn since the 1970s, when the first volume of the English translations of his papers appeared (Neurath 1973), followed by the second, 10 years later (Neurath 1983). At the same time, a renewed interest in his work could be seen among some Austrian scholars, who also began preparing the critical German-language edition of Neurath’s writings, which came out during the next two decades (Neurath 1981, 1991, 1998) The editorship of these volumes is largely due to Rudolf Haller, a pioneer in the study of modern Austrian philosophy in general, and logical empiricism in particular. Some of the new Austrian studies were translated and published by Thomas Uebel (1991). A year later, Uebel’s own monograph, Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within: The Emergence of Neurath’s Naturalism in the Vienna Circle’s Protocol Sentence Debate (1992), became a true game changer in the perception of the Austrian philosopher and social scientist. Neurath was no longer a mere indefatigable spiritus agens of the Vienna Circle, but a thinker of the highest caliber, equal even to Carnap in importance. It was Neurath who, nearly two decades before Quine, overcame traditional empiricism and originated modern philosophical naturalism. Another very significant contribution which appeared during the 1990s was the collective monograph, Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cartwright et al. 1996) which combined an intellectual biography with an analysis of Neurath’s contributions to a variety of fields, and an assessment of his contemporary relevance. A few more specialized volumes of scholarship followed during the last decade. Otto Neurath‘s Economics in Context (Nemeth et al. 2008) accompanied the English edition of Neurath’s economic writings (Neurath 2004) and situated his theories * Tomáš Hříbek [email protected] 1
Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
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with respect to the Austrian tradition and various socialist alternatives. Nader Vossoughian (2008) assessed the “Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics” (ISOTYPE) in a context of Neurath’s interests in modernist design, architecture and urbanism, from the period of Red Vienna, through his brief encounters with Bauhaus and the CIAM, to his exile in Great Britain. Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science (Symons et al. 2011) collects studies on the contemporary relevance of the unity of science program as well as new historical research. Finally, Günther Sandner’s (2014) recent b
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