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This chapter examines four murder trials that became stages upon which tensions between city and province intertwined with Jewishness, revealing its function as a deeply engrained system used to shape contemporary interpretations of unexpected events in unstable times. Philipp Halsmann was tried and convicted twice for the murder of his father Max, a dentist from Riga, who was bludgeoned to death while the two were climbing in the Alps. The dramatic rhetoric used during the trial, along with the lack of evidence or viable motive, evoked centuries-old accusations against Jews for blood libel. These trials mirrored two other interwar murder trials in Vienna that are now interpreted as two egregious examples of antisemitic violence: the public assassinations of author Hugo Bettauer and philosophy professor Moritz Schlick. However, their non-Jewish assassins avoided heavy punishment by engaging more modern forms of antisemitism to legitimate their violent acts.

Mortiz Schlick’s article of this title was highly influential in convincing several generations of philosophers that GTR outrightly falsified any variety of Kantian epistemology. In fact, the empiricism Schlick countered to transcendental idealism had not yet appeared in his previous writings but was quickly cobbled together from disparate elements: Henri Poincaré’s geometric conventionalism and selective readings of Einstein’s “Geometry and Experience” and earlier texts of Hermann von Helmholtz. The result of Schlick’s improvisation is that the empiricist interpretation of the spacetime metric rests on conventions regarding the behavior of rigid rods and clocks.

This chapter addresses the philosophical debate surrounding general relativity in its formative period, from Einstein's own writings on methodological and epistemological aspects of the theory to the first reactions by philosophers such as Moritz Schlick, Ernst Cassirer, and Hans Reichenbach. The focus is on the philosophical investigations clarifying and reinterpreting the conceptual foundations of general relativity. General relativity emerged from Einstein's concerns for the foundations of physics. His early readings of philosophers had made him aware of the delicate relation between the fundamental concepts of space and time and experience. In creating special relativity, David Hume's empiricism and Poincaré's conventionalism had been helpful because they encouraged Einstein to ascribe new notions of space and time to coordinates that in Hendrik Lorentz's electrodynamics had no direct physical meaning.

The general theory of relativity (GTR) brought a revolutionary transformation in philosophical as well as physical outlook. The philosopher Mortiz Schick, student of Max Planck, played a pivotal role in fashioning the received view that GTR implied the untenability of any type of Kantian philosophy. Schlick’s assessment ignored the philosophically motivated contributions to GTR by Hermann Weyl and Arthur Eddington. Paul Dirac in 1931 recognized the significance of a new method of a priori mathematical speculation in theoretical physics, tying it to Eddington (and to Weyl).

This paper argues that historians of philosophy must coin concepts that disclose the near or distant past and create a shared horizon for our philosophical future. Two concepts are introduced: “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” and “philosophic prophecy.” “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” explains that from about 1700 onward, “natural science” is increasingly taken to be authoritative in settling debates within philosophy. “Philosophic prophecy,” comprises the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers can shape possible futures, including that of philosophy. The second half of the paper offers a fresh narrative about the shared origins of analytical philosophy and analytical history of philosophy in the anti-Spinozistic writings of George Boole and Bertrand Russell. Ernest Nagel is treated as the philosophic prophet of analytical philosophy his views are compared to those of Moritz Schlick.

Happiness can be attained only if we take life as it comes each and every day. The idea is that we can live on faith, and that faith or love may yield the happiness of thinking that all is for the best, both in the universe and in our relationships with other people. This beneficent state has been characterized either as the ability to play, which is common in children, or a quasi-mystical acceptance of mere existence. Both views may appear implausible and even counterintuitive, but play as the source of both happiness and meaning has found support from the Austrian philosopher Moritz Schlick, who associated the ability to enjoy life with an attitude of playfulness. This chapter argues that much of happiness involves a kind of fulfillment which cannot be explained by the concept of playfulness alone, and also examines Bertrand Russell’s concept of happiness.

This chapter recounts the early history of non-descriptive approaches to modality and why they fell out of favor. It begins by tracing the challenges of understanding modality back to British empiricists such as Hume and Mill. It then moves to discussing the form of modal conventionalism developed by Moritz Schlick and promoted by A. J. Ayer, and examines common criticisms raised against conventionalism—finding that they misconstrue the view. The chapter also recounts Wittgenstein’s development of a view along these lines, along with later developments of non-descriptive views by Ramsey, Ryle, and Sellars. Such views encountered familiar problems such as the Frege-Geach or “embedding” problem, and later barriers arose with the work of Quine and Kripke. The challenge is thus laid out for a contemporary non-descriptivist view to show how it can overcome these historical barriers.

This chapter discusses how Kurt Gödel found his theorem. He started to study physics at the University of Vienna in 1924, then changed to mathematics in 1926. That same year, he started attending the meetings of the Vienna Circle. These were weekly gatherings on philosophical topics that were headed by the philosopher Moritz Schlick. The philosophy of the circle came to be known as logical empiricism and had an enormous effect on the world of philosophy. Gödel later wanted to emphasize that he by no means shared all of the philosophical ideas of the circle. In the meetings, Gödel came to know the philosopher Rudolf Carnap and the mathematician Karl Menger, in whose mathematical colloquium he later presented many of his results.