Philosophy Now-Aug-Sept 2019

August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 11

(from ‘The End of Metaphysics?’ in Western Philosophy: An Anthol-

ogy, edited by John Cottingham). Carnap confidently proclaimed

that in the Circle’s new materialist philosophy of science, “a rad-

ical elimination of metaphysics is attained, which was not yet pos-

sible from the earlier anti-metaphysical standpoints.”

In fact, the logical positivists dismissed all non-scientific spec-

ulation altogether, not just in philosophy, insisting that all state-

ments and theories are literally meaningless unless they can be

logically verified or checked by experiment or observation. This

is the so-called verification principle. A.J. Ayer was not a member

of the Vienna Circle, but was powerfully influenced by it, and

sprang its ideas upon the English-speaking world with his book

Language, Truth and Logic. He argued that every verifiable propo-

sition is meaningful (though it may be either true or false), and

L

ogical positivism was a philosophical movement of the
1920s and 30s which wanted to introduce the method-
ology of science and mathematics to philosophy. As
part of this ambition, the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis
in German) of logical positivists tried to purge philosophy of
metaphysics – by which they meant any speculation that could
not be tested using the methods of modern empirical science.
The members of the Vienna Circle, including its nominal leader
Moritz Schlick, found the speculative claims of traditional meta-
physics, especially those based on religion, to be false, uncertain,
or sterile. For Rudolph Carnap, another influential member of
the Circle, “the (pseudo)statements of metaphysics do not serve
for the description of states of affairs.” They are, like poetry and
music, “in the domain of art and not in the domain of theory”

Einstein vs Logical Positivism

Rossen Vassilev Jr. asks if modern physics has become too metaphysical.

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