Moritz Schlick
Schlick, Moritz
(mō`rĭts shlĭk), 1882–1936, German philosopher, b. Berlin, grad. Univ. of Berlin (1904). He taught at Rostock and Kiel before he became (1922) professor of the philosophy of inductive sciences at the Univ. of Vienna; there he was the leader of the Vienna Circle, a group of logical positivists (see logical positivismlogical positivism,also known as logical or scientific empiricism, modern school of philosophy that attempted to introduce the methodology and precision of mathematics and the natural sciences into the field of philosophy. The movement, which began in the early 20th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. ). Influenced by Ludwig WittgensteinWittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann
, 1889–1951, Austrian philosopher, b. Vienna. Life
Originally trained as an engineer, Wittgenstein turned to philosophy, went to Cambridge, where he studied (1912–13) with Bertrand Russell, and further developed his
..... Click the link for more information. and Rudolf CarnapCarnap, Rudolf
, 1891–1970, German-American philosopher. He taught philosophy at the Univ. of Vienna (1926–31) and at the German Univ. in Prague (1931–35). After going to the United States he taught at the Univ. of Chicago (1936–52) and at the Univ.
..... Click the link for more information. . Schlick emphasized experience as the means of establishing the truth of claims to knowledge. His works include General Theory of Knowledge (2d ed. 1925) and Problems of Ethics (tr. 1939).
Schlick, Moritz
Born Apr. 14, 1882, in Berlin; died June 22, 1936, in Vienna. Austrian philosopher and physicist; leading representative of the early stage of logical positivism, founder of the Vienna circle.
Schlick was a professor of philosophy and physics at the universities of Rostock from 1917 to 1920, Kiel in 1921 and 1922, and Vienna from 1922 to 1936; he was a visiting professor at Stanford University in California in 1931 and 1932. Schlick’s philosophical framework was logical empiricism, at which he arrived after renouncing critical realism under the influence of R. Carnap and L. Wittgenstein. Schlick based himself on the concept of the “sensible present”—the sense experience of a cognizing individual that is incommunicable to other subjects. According to Schlick, only the structural relations of a sense experience can be the object of knowledge—relations that reproduce the order of phenomena. The so-called rational truths, including the statements of logic and mathematics, have a purely analytical character; they are tautologies that do not make it possible to penetrate into unperceived reality. According to Schlick, the problem of the cognition of the essence of existence is meaningless; the laws of nature are for him formal rules determined by the syntax of the language in which a description of nature is given.
Schlick was one of the first to formulate the principle of verification as a criterion of scientific understanding. He occupied himself extensively with the application of his philosophical viewpoint to specific problems of the philosophy of science (analysis of space and time, causality, probability) and of ethics.
WORKS
Der Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik. Berlin, 1917.Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, 2nd ed. Berlin, 1925.
Fragen der Ethik. Vienna, 1930.
Les Enoncxés scientifiques et la réalité du monde exterieur. Paris, 1934.
Gesammelte Aufsätze. Vienna, 1938.
Philosophy of Nature. New York, 1949.
Natur und Kultur. Vienna, 1952.
REFERENCE
Hill, T. E. Sovremennye teorii poznaniia. Moscow, 1965. Pages 365–69. (Translated from English.)I. S. DOBRONRAVOV