secularization had long since taken place. France, whose academic organization
differed most from the German model adopted elsewhere, was least coordi-
nated with the contents of realigning movements in other countries. Neither a
logical positivist nor an ordinary language movement developed in France;
when realignment came in the late 1920s and the 1930s, spiritualism and
vitalism were replaced by phenomenology and existentialism imported from
Germany.
At the cost of some chronological backtracking, we will trace each of the
three main movements: first the logical positivists, whose flagship was the
Vienna Circle; then the ordinary language movement, which originated in
British networks simultaneously with Russell’s logicist movement and claimed
Wittgenstein as apostate from one movement to the other. Finally we return
to the German side to pick up the parallel development originating in the
networks of mathematicians and of Neo-Kantians that became phenomenology
and eventually existentialism. The two big German movements, starting from
much the same roots, reorganized the intellectual field around new conflicts
and grew steadily more opposed. In the process the older Neo-Kantianism
which dominated philosophy during the period of disciplinary differentiation,
was displaced from the center of the attention space.
The Vienna Circle is an amalgam of three ancestral networks: Neo-
Kantians, physicist-positivists, and mathematician-logicians of the foundations
struggle.^23 In the personal intersection of these networks and the super-concen-
tration of the oppositions going on both within and among each group, we
find the source of the creative energy of the Vienna Circle (see Figure 13.4).
When logical positivists superseded Neo-Kantians, they broke up a modus
vivendi among scientists and philosophers going back to Helmholtz in the
1850s. The laws of mathematical science had long been defended by Cohen’s
Marburg school. The interpretation by Cohen’s pupil Cassirer of the new
phenomenalistic physics was widely regarded as preserving objectivity better
than Mach’s extremism, and as providing the best philosophical interpretation
of Einsteinian relativity theory. Cassirer in 1910 held influentially that matter,
substance, and force have no ontological reality; the subject of science is mere
phenomenological description, structured by theoretical statements of func-
tional connections. At virtually the same time, Vaihinger became famous for
his Philosophy of As-If (1911), stating that we operate on the basis of necessary
fictions taken as if they were true.^24 Schlick and Reichenbach, too, were avowed
Kantians up to the early 1920s, as were Carnap and Popper still later.
Neo-Kantianism was changing, but creative developments normally serve
to keep a school alive. Why then did this one die? Cassirer read the lesson of
relativity physics as showing that the particularities of Euclidean geometry
could not be taken as a priori; there was a development of the categories that
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^719