Vienna Circle was developing in the 1920s, Einstein was going in the opposite
direction. The fact is Einstein’s special relativity was taken as support by all the
major philosophical positions alike: Neo-Kantian, positivist, realist, pragmatist,
and even religious Idealist.
- We have seen this in the endless critiques by ancient Greek Academics pointing out
contradictions in the doctrines of Stoics, and in the imperviousness of Epicureans
to attack. In ancient India the Ajivikas were ridiculed for their inconsistency
between believing in all-encompassing Fate and their personal striving for libera-
tion. In medieval India the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school responded to acute Buddhist
and Advaita attacks on paradoxes in their position not by backing away from their
realism but by extending it. These schools lasted many generations without chang-
ing their positions.
- Popper states in his autobiography that he had had the basic idea already in 1919,
as the result of disgust with Marxist politics and the enthusiastic claims of the
Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalytic factions. This was at about the same time
Schlick was invoking falsification against the Neo-Kantians; but neither Schlick
nor Popper made much further use of the idea in these years. Popper’s family and
personal connections brought him in contact with a wide range of the avant-garde
political, musical, and social science movements in Vienna during the 1920s; these
connections also kept his career interests scattered until 1930, when he began to
focus on developing the philosophical implications of a falsification criterion in
terms of the debates that were now splitting the Vienna Circle. Although he
retrospectively portrays himself as the destroyer of logical positivism, Popper
became famous through his connection with the Vienna Circle (Popper, 1976:
36–38, 78–90, 107).
- Kuhn’s originating network overlaps with that of Quine: both were members of
the Harvard Society of Junior Fellows, and early in their careers both were
personally connected to Conant, who built up the program in history of science
at Harvard. Kuhn’s work is the best-known result of the confluence of two major
organizational developments: the differentiation of the academic discipline of his-
tory of science, together with the foundation-of-science issues generated by cross-
disciplinary border flows of mathematics and physics into philosophy which con-
stituted the Vienna Circle.
- Moore however remained oblivious to the revolt against the subject-predicate form
being carried out by Frege and Russell; small wonder Wittgenstein despised the
book.
- See the genealogical charts in Levy (1981: 22–25); Bell (1972: xviii–xix). There is
nothing to match this elsewhere. In Germany, Brentano came from a family of
famous writers, and Fichte’s son had some reputation among theological Idealists;
but in general German linkages are purely academic ones. In America, James and
Peirce were born into families of famous intellectuals, but overall the intellectual
network has few kinship ties. Nor were British philosophers usually tied together
by kinship, except in these few generations. Under previous conditions, most
intellectuals were either celibate clerics or recipients of patronage in aristocratic
Notes to Pages 720–732^ •^1017
