On the Vienna circle in exile

an eyewitness report

Gerald Holton

pp. 269-292

in: Werner Depauli Schimanovich, Eckehart Köhler, Friedrich Stadler (eds), The foundational debate, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

During its most vigorous period, the Vienna Circle movement was, by and large, kept rather marginal by the political and academic forces in its European home; they tended to see it as a dangerous search, in the Enlightenment tradition, for a world conception that would be free from metaphysical illusions, free from the kind of clericalism that had a strangle-hold on state and university, and free from the romantic madness of the rising fascist ideology. The wonder, in fact, is that in its day, against such opposition, the Vienna Circle commanded adherence by such an array of distinguished intellectuals, even if they were only a small fraction of the total intelligentsia.