!!!Philosophie

Philosophy: In Austria, the year 1874 is generally regarded as the 
beginning of an independent school of philosophy, when F.  Brentano 
was called to Austria. With his work he initiated the development of a 
philosophical school at the University of Vienna which was in clear 
opposition to the speculative idealism prevailing in the 
German-speaking universities of that time. Precursor of this movement 
was B. Bolzano, a logician of the Biedermeier period from Bohemia. 
Brentano aimed at developing a philosophy exclusively oriented on 
methods of the natural sciences. In his wake, 2 philosophical groups 
took shape: on the one hand, the circle around A. Marty, including E. 
Arleth, J. Eisenmeier, F. Hillebrand, A. Kostil, O. Kraus and E. 
Utitz, who adhered to the theories of Brentano, while on the other 
hand scholars such as C. v.  Ehrenfels, the founder of gestalt 
theory, the phenomenologist E. Husserl, T. G.  Masaryk, the 
future president of Czechoslovakia, and A.  Meinong, who founded the 
"Graz School" and made great advances in the fields of 
Gegenstandstheorie (theory of objects) and experimental psychology, 
took different directions. After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire 
the philosophical movement of Logical Empiricism (also called 
Neopositivism) was formed, which soon became known the world over 
under the name  "Wiener Kreis" or Vienna Circle. Central figures 
of the Wiener Kreis were M.  Schlick and O.  Neurath, who were 
surrounded by well-known representatives of the social and 
mathematical sciences, such as R.  Carnap, H. Feigl, P.  Frank, K.  
Goedel, H.  Hahn, F. Kaufmann, V.  Kraft, K. Menger, F. Waismann and 
E. Zilsel. L.  Wittgenstein and K.  Popper, who were both born in 
Vienna, spent most of their working life in Great Britain, but were 
closely linked to the Wiener Kreis for some time. The physicist E.  
Mach exercised a profound influence on the development of the 
positivist movement. The main objectives of the Wiener Kreis were the 
strictly scientific orientation of philosophical thinking and its 
justification through logical methods of linguistic analysis, hence 
opposing all forms of metaphysics. This meant, in particular, a 
general rejection of the doctrines of Kant and of German Idealism.

!Literature
J. C. Marek et al. (eds.), Oesterreichische 
Philosophen und ihr Einfluss auf die analytische Philosophie der 
Gegenwart, 1977; J. C. Nyiri (ed.), Von Bolzano zu Wittgenstein, 
1986; P. Kruntorad (ed.), Jour fixe der Vernunft. Der Wiener Kreis und 
seine Folgen, 1991; J. Valent and T. Binder, Oesterreichische 
Philosophie, exhibition catalogue, Graz 1992.


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