Otto Neurath

1. Quote/Unquote Philosophers like other people often have a weakness for quiz-shows. And like the crew in the Hunting of the Snark, they are all of them fond of quotations 1 . So I begin with a quotation and a question. The quotation comes from a famous o indeed a ‘superstar’ o text. But which text? Which famous writer indicted these lines? The purpose of the universal jargon was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of logical empiricism, but to make other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when the universal jargon had been adopted for all and the metaphysically infected terminology forgotten, a metaphysical thought o that is a thought diverging from what logical empiricism regarded as genuinely thinkable o should be literally unthinkable, at least in so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a log...

The paper explores the relation several members of the Vienna Circle had with the Brouwer and with the Dutch Significs group around Gerrit Mannoury. Mannoury was an early mentor to Brouwer, but later also frequently published in "Erkenntnis" and was connected to the Unity of Science Movement. The paper emphasizes first Brouwer´s influence on the Vienna Circle and focuses then on the relation between Neurath and Mannoury during Neurath´s exile in the Netherlands.

La crítica de Horkheimer al empirismo lógico del Círculo de Viena en su ensayo “El último ataque a la metafísica” (1937) motivó la respuesta de Neurath, principal blanco de las críticas, con la redacción del texto “Ciencia unificada y empirismo lógico: una réplica” (1937). En el presente artículo nos ocupamos de dilucidar el contexto de la polémica entre la Teoría Crítica y el empirismo lógico. Tomamos como eje argumental de nuestra exposición el conjunto de temáticas sobre las que Horkheimer fundamentó sus críticas, así como las distintas respuestas que ofreció Neurath ante tales invectivas. Asimismo, se muestran los paralelismos existentes que vinculan esta primera polémica con la “disputa sobre el positivismo” (Positivismusstreit).

Trotz seines Alters, sehen viele Designers auch heute im ISOTYPE-System immer noch eine Inspiration zur Lösung aktueller Designprobleme. Da die Welt sich jedoch sehr verändert hat, stellt sich die Frage: Spielt ISOTYPE heutzutage tatsächlich noch eine Rolle? Und, wenn ja, wie kommt es in der gegenwärtigen Design-Welt zum Ausdruck?. Um diese Fragen zu antworten, ist es nötig den Generierungsprozess seiner Konfigurationselemente weiter zu untersuchen, da diese Elemente nach und nach ISOTYPE gestalteten und das System zum Leben erweckten. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, Arbeitsmuster oder Eigenschaften des ISOTYPE-Systems und seines Transformationsprozesses zu erkennen und zu organisieren, um vorherzusagen, welche von ihnen im Laufe der Jahrebleiben werden und was wir noch von ihnen lernen können.

Das Problem der Expertokratie (Herrschaft der Experten) wirkt zunächst unscheinbar gegenüber dem öffentlichkeitswirksameren Diskurs über ‚Populismus'. Bei näherem Hinsehen zeigt sich jedoch ein enger Zusammenhang, wenn es sich nicht gar um zwei komplementäre Phänomene handelt: Der Aufstieg des Populismus kann auch als Antwort auf die ungebremste Macht von Experten verstanden werden. Als politisches Problem hat Expertokratie eine lange Geschichte, die auf die Anfänge der griechischen politischen Philosophie zurückgeht. Das Thema der Macht von Experten ruft die grundsätzliche Frage nach dem Wissen von politischen Dingen auf und verweist auf die Krise des politischen Wissens. Auf diese Weise konfrontiert es uns mit tiefgreifenden Herausforderungen für die Demokratie im 21. Jahrhundert.

Mémoire de master 1 de philosophie. Que recouvre l'expression de "conception scientifique du monde" (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung) au sein du Cercle de Vienne et selon Otto Neurath en particulier ? Quelles en sont ses caractéristiques, son contexte d'élaboration et les conséquences de sa mise en pratique ?

A pesar de su antigüedad, muchos diseñadores ven en ISOTYPE y su metodología una importante fuente de inspiración para la resolución de problemas actuales de diseño. Considerando que mundo de hoy es muy diferente, cabe preguntarse: ¿Sigue siendo realmente vigente el legado de ISOTYPE en la actualidad? Y en caso de que lo sea, ¿cómo éste se expresa en la labor actual de los diseñadores?. Para responder a estas preguntas es necesario revisar en mayor profundidad el proceso de generación de los elementos que conformaron y fueron dando vida gradualmente a ISOTYPE.
Particularmente, el objetivo en este ensayo es detectar y organizar los patrones de trabajo o características presentes en la labor del transformador y en ISOTYPE como sistema que lograron perdurar con los años y de los que actualmente podríamos seguir aprendiendo.

Sign systems, consist of symbols and pictograms, has a great role in rapidly developing recent technological systems, complicating city life, mutually understanding of people from different cultures and languages. Signs, symbols and pictograms, which are having functions like informing, directing and forming a vernacular, have the aim of providing an universal communication that can be understand by all people despite the language, culture and religion differences.

Otto Neurath's ISOTYPE picture language, which is trying to form "a wordless global language", is an important milestone while considering much rapid and effective communication need and the process about developing an easy and universal visual communication system without any needs of words. The aim of this graphic language, which is formed with simple pictograms, is to communicate easily without any needs of knowing any language with removing the borders between cultures and languages. Simple pictograms system, used by Otto Neurath in ISOTYPE, is pioneering the modern data visulization and information graphics as presenting the complicated statistical data in simple graphic forms. Pictograms and data visualizations, prepared by Otto Neurath in social, political, economical, healthcare and education topics are the first ones in this field and also directing more than effecting the pictograms, data visualizations and information graphics in recent visual communication design scope.

Στην έρευνα αυτή εξετάζεται η επίδραση του φιλοσοφικού ρεύματος του Λογικού θετικισμού στην ελληνική μοντέρνα αρχιτεκτονική και ειδικότερα η σκέψη του Otto Neurath σε σχέση με τις μοντερνιστικές θεωρίες της εποχής. Ο Αυστριακός φιλόσοφος Otto Neurath, από τους ιδρυτές του Κύκλου της Βιέννης  και σημαίνον μέλος του φιλοσοφικού ρεύματος του λογικού θετικισμού που επηρέασε την εξέλιξη της αναλυτικής φιλοσοφίας τόσο στην Ευρώπη όσο και στην Αμερική, έλαβε μέρος ως σύνεδρος στο 4ο CIAM που έγινε το 1933 στην Αθήνα. Η συμμετοχή του συνδεόταν με την κατασκευή από μέρους του της εικονιστικής γλώσσας isotype, ένα είδος «εικονογραφημένης εσπεράντο», η οποία θεωρήθηκε ότι μπορούσε να χρησιμοποιηθεί για την καθολική επικοινωνία και τη δημόσια εκπαίδευση. Λόγω της γραφιστικής σαφήνειας και απλότητας των παραστάσεών της θα μπορούσε επίσης να αξιοποιηθεί σε συνάφεια με το θέμα του συνεδρίου που ήταν η λειτουργική πόλη. Στην εργασία μας θα δείξουμε τη σχέση της γλώσσας του Neurath με τη μοντέρνα αρχιτεκτονική και τον μοντερνισμό γενικά υποστηρίζοντας ότι η αφαίρεση που οδηγεί σε απλές εικόνες, διαγράμματα και σχέδια αντιστοιχεί στην αφαίρεση που χαρακτηρίζει τον μοντερνισμό. Ο ίδιος ο Neurath, ο οποίος είχε ενεργό συμμετοχή στην οικιστική πολιτική της Κόκκινης Βιέννης, αμφισβητούσε κατά πόσον μπορούσε η πολεοδομία και η αρχιτεκτονική από μόνες τους να βελτιώσουν τη ζωή των ανθρώπων και έκρινε ότι η εδραίωση του μοντερνισμού απαιτούσε επίσης την εκπαίδευση του κοινού και ειδικά των λαϊκών μαζών. Θα υποστηρίξουμε ότι αυτό που είχε υπόψη του, μεταξύ άλλων, ήταν η επεξεργασία και η διδασκαλία μιας στοιχειώδους βασικής γλώσσας με εικόνες -πρόγραμμα που συγκεντρώνει πολλά από τα χαρακτηριστικά, αλλά και τα προβλήματα, των ιστορικών επιδιώξεων για την κατασκευή μιας καθολικής γλώσσας.

This dissertation is a historical study of influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, explored from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Although no ‘Great Man’ in his own right, Ogden had a personal connection, reflected in his work, to several of the most significant figures of the age. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I.A. Richards (1893–1979), is examined in detail, along with the application of these ideas in his international language project Basic English. A richly interlaced network of connections is revealed between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics, all inevitably shaped by the contemporary cultural and political environment. In particular, significant interaction is shown between Ogden’s ideas, the varying versions of ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgensten (1889–1951), Victoria Lady Welby’s (1837–1912) ‘significs’, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) of the Vienna Circle. Amid these interactions emerges a previously little known mutual exchange between the academic philosophy and linguistics of the period and the practically oriented efforts of the international language movement. In exploring these connections, novel light is shed on the intellectual history of a period crucial in the development of both linguistics and philosophy.

This article examines the political ideas of Otto Neurath (1882−1945), a major figure of the Vienna Circle. As it seeks to demonstrate, even the most technical aspects of Neurath's philosophical work-the philosophy of language, the argument in favor of visual language, and the theory of protocol statements-must be read as parts of a new political religion. The political religion of the Vienna Circle was meant to erase all traces of religion and tradition. In particular, it was devised to replace Judaism, which most members stemmed from: It induced the Jews to give up their traditions and habits and become members of a rational world society led by technological planning experts. The following analyses trace Neurath's political ideas from a remote expert opinion on the Jewish colonization of Palestine to his late political treatise on expertocracy and democracy, and proceed to some of the expert writings on science, philosophy, and language from there. Neurath spoke the language of democratization, but his own authoritarian inclinations came shining through. Ultimately, he advocated for expertocratic rule in the language of democratic empowerment.

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle's members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna Circle's leader Moritz Schlick admired and praised Nietzsche, rejecting what he saw as a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as a militarist or proto-fascist. Schlick, Frank, Neurath, and Carnap were in different ways committed to the view that Nietzsche made a significant contribution to the overcoming of metaphysics. Some of these philosophers praised the intimate connection Nietzsche drew between his philosophical outlook and empirical studies in psychology and physiology. In his 1912 lectures on Nietzsche, Schlick maintained that Nietzsche overcame an initial Schopenhauerian metaphysical-artistic phase in his thinking, and subsequently remained a positivist until his last writings. Frank and Neurath made the weaker claim that Nietzsche contributed to the development of a positivistic or scientific conception of the world. Schlick and Frank took a further step in seeing the mature Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker.

In this paper, I study Otto Neurath's contribution to philosophy of science. In doing so, I challenge a popular reconstruction of Logical Empiricism. I will claim that this reconstruction is tenable only  if we neglect the relevance of Logical Empiricists' political agenda and its interplay with the philosophical stance of the Vienna Circle's left wing.

In the summer of 1932, Wittgenstein alleged that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science" made extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas.  In a letter to Schlick he complained that he would "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s."  In this paper, I look at the relationship between Carnap’s paper, subsequently reprinted as The Unity of Science, and Wittgenstein’s discussion of related topics in the first seven chapters of the Philosophical Remarks and other writing from 1929-1932.

The history of early analytic philosophy, and especially the work of the logical empiricists, has often been seen as involving antagonisms with rival schools. Though recent scholarship has interrogated the Vienna Circle’s relations with e.g. phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism, important works by some of its leading members are involved in responding to the rising tide of Lebensphilosophie. This paper will explore Carnap’s configuration of the relation between Lebensphilosophie and the overcoming of metaphysics, Schlick’s responses to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Neurath’s reaction against Spengler.

Heutige Piktogramme entstammen einem von Otto Neurath in den 1920ern entwickelten bildsprachlichem System - dem International System of Typographic Picture Education (ISOTYPE). Dieses System ist eine moderne Bildersprache, welche durch Kombination von Isotypen (Piktogrammen) nach bestimmten Regeln gesellschaftliche Tatbestände, meist in statistischer Form, darstellt. Sie wurde als Hilfssprache in Ergänzung zum geschriebenen bzw. gesprochenen Wort konzipiert und dient der Verbreitung wissenschaftlichen Wissens auf einem möglichst niedrigen Anschlussniveau.

Das Werk Neuraths wird hauptsächlich durch sein Wirken als Philosoph und
Wissenschaftstheoretiker dominiert. Als Mitglied des Wiener Kreises und Vertreter des Logischen Empirismus ist Neuraths Einfluss auf diese geistigen Strömungen und seine Beiträge dazu weitreichend rezipiert worden. Weniger bekannt ist sein Wirken als Aufklärer, Utopist, Museumsdidakt und Bildpädagoge. Diese Aspekte, sowie die Genese des ISOTYPEs sollen vor allem in der vorliegenden Arbeit eine zentrale Rolle spielen.

Bilimi ve bilimsel bilgiyi kültür, değer ve öznel yargılardan izole ederek nesnel bir şekilde ortaya koyabilmeye yönelik hararetli tartışmaların yaşandığı yirminci yüzyıl bilim anlayışının temel gayesi, deney ve gözleme tabi olabilecek fiziki dünyadaki olguları, mantıksal çözümlemeye tabi tutarak birleştirilmiş bilime ulaşmaktır. Bu amaca giden yolda olgulara dayanmayan ve sınanamayan her türlü metafizik öge yok sayılır. Bilimsel bilginin sadece deney ve gözleme tabi olana, diğer bir deyişle olgu verilerine dayandığı iddiasını taşıyan bu düşünce sistemi, özellikle Viyana Çevresi üyeleri tarafından benimsenmiştir. Bu bakımdan Çevre üyelerinin bilimsellik anlayışındaki temel ölçüt olgulara dayanan önermelerin ya da yargıların doğrulanabilmesidir. Bilimsel bilginin sadece olgusal dünyanın gözlemlenmesi ve bu gözlem sonucunda ortaya konulan önermelerin ya da ifadelerin doğrulanmasıyla sağlandığını düşünen Çevre üyelerinin bu savlarındaki amacı bilimi ve onun bilgisini her türlü kültür ve değer alanından uzaklaştırarak metafiziksel unsurlardan arındırılmış nesnel bilgiye ulaşmaktır. Çevre üyelerinin birçoğu bilim alanı içerisinde tartışmaya yol açan meselelerin aslında metafiziksel içerikli ve dolayısıyla bunların görünüşte problemler olduğunu belirterek bu tartışmaların bilimsel bilginin gelişimi önünde bir engel oluşturacağı kanaatindedir (Hızır, 1965, s. 254). Söz gelimi, Carnap’a göre, metafizik ögeler olgusal içeriğe sahip olmadığı ve sınanabilir nitelikte olmadıkları için bilim alanı içerisinde değerlendirilemez. Bu nedenle, metafizik ögeler hem doğrulanması mümkün olmadığı hem de dilin mantıksal dizimine genellikle uymadığı gerekçesiyle anlamsızdır (Öztürk, 2011, s. 155). Bu bakımdan Çevre üyelerine göre, olgulara dayanmayan ve bilimde yanılsamalara yol açan metafizik söylemler bilimden ayıklanmalı ve bilimsel bilgi ancak olgu ve deneye dayanan önermeler üzerinden yürütülmelidir. Öte yandan Çevre düşünürleri mantıksal çözümleme yoluyla olgulara dayanan önermelerin metafiziksel unsurlar içeren önermelerden ayırt edilebileceğini ifade etmiştir. Bu bağlamda metafizik önermeleri, metafizik olmayan önermelerden ayırt edecek ölçütün doğrulanabilirlik olduğunu savunurlar. Çevre üyelerinin bu tutumları bir bakıma bilim ve sözde bilim arasında ayrım yapma ve metafiziği bilimin dışında tutma çabası olarak da değerlendirilebilir (Kabadayı, 2011, s. 39-40). Yirminci yüzyıl bilim anlayışında bilimsel etkinlikte gözlemin ve gözlemi yürüten bilim insanlarının dolaysız öznel duyu verileriyle ilişkili olduğu bu nedenle gözlem verilerinin psikolojizmin etkisinde olduğu fikri ortaya atılır. Başta Neurath olmak üzere dönemin bilim felsefecileri bilimsel bilginin kültür, değer ve psikoloji gibi öznel unsurlardan uzaklaştığı sürece değerli olduğu kanısında olduğu için bu fikre karşı çıkmaktadır (Gillies, 2018, s. 123). Görüldüğü üzere, Çevre üyelerinin temel amacı metafizik önermelerden arındırılmış, olgulara dayanan bir bilime ulaşmaktır. Bu amacın gerçekleşmesine olanak sağlayacak yöntem ise mantıksal çözümlemedir. Bu bağlamda Çevre üyeleri olgulara dayanan ve doğrulanabilen önermelerin, söz dizimi (sentaks) ve anlamsal (semantik) açıdan incelemeye tabi tutulması gerektiğini düşünmektedir (Yardımcı, 2018, s. 13-15). Özellikle Carnap (1935, s. 9-10) doğrulamanın ancak öne sürülen önermenin mantıksal analize tabi tutularak yapılması gerektiğini iddia etmiştir (Irzık, 1962, s. 65). Bununla birlikte, felsefenin işlevi, önermeleri mantıksal analize tabi tutarak yalın hale getirmektir. İşte felsefenin bu yönü Neurath’da bilimin birliği, Carnap’ta ise bilimin sentaksı, yani bilimin mantığı üzerine çalışma anlamına gelir (Hızır, 1965, s. 252). Bilimi, bilim olmayandan ayırma yöntemi olarak kullanılan doğrulama işlemi, teorik bir söylem ve gözlem önermesi arasında yapılan bir işlem olması bakımından mantıksal ve dilsel bir özellik taşır. Buradaki temel sorun ise teorik bir önermenin gözlem önermelerine indirgenebilir nitelikte olması ve gözlem önermelerinin, gözlem ile nasıl ilişki kurduğunu saptamaktır. İşte Viyana Çevresi üyeleri bu ilişkinin protokol önermeleri ile kurulduğu kanaatindedir (Ural, 2012, s. 105-107) çünkü onlara göre; öznelerarası bir bilimin sağlanması için yansız ve anlam karmaşasından arındırılmış bir dil gereklidir (Serin, 2015, s. 55). Bu dil de ancak protokol önermeler aracılığıyla kurulabilir. Bu bağlamda Çevre üyelerinin, metafiziksel ifadeler barındıran önermelerin anlamsızlığı ve bilimleri ortak bir paydada birleştiren fiziksel bir dil oluşturma olmak üzere iki temel hedefinin olduğu söylenebilir (Godfrey-Smith, 2003, s. 25; Salgar, 2012, s. 187).

During the late 1930s, the failed attempt at collaboration between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle culminated in Horkheimer's 1937 paper 'The Latest Attack on Metaphysics'. Horkheimer ([1937] 1972), relying on a caricature of positivism as espousing an uncritical myth of the given, drew far-reaching conclusions concerning positivism's conservative prohibition of the radical questioning of appearances. Horkheimer (1940) later applied some of these criticisms to Dilthey's conception of Verstehen, while presenting Logical Empiricism as dismissing Dilthey's proposals nothing more than poetry. By examining Neurath's unpublished reply to Horkheimer, and drawing on Uebel's (2019) account of Logical Empiricism's stance towards Verstehen, this chapter will attempt to dispel Horkheimer's caricature. I will highlight a parallel between Neurath's attitude towards (i) claims about Verstehen in social science and (ii) Horkheimer's proposals for the use of Vernunft by a 'supra-scientific' Critical Theory. Neurath argues that once Horkheimer's objections to 'positivism' are reformulated in non-metaphysical terms, they point towards a genuine problem concerning science's relation to social praxis. For Neurath, the problem can be addressed from within (rather than, as Horkheimer would have it, from above) empirically-minded investigations in the history and sociology of science.

The Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath (Vienna 1882 - Oxford 1945) was the only non-architect who participated in the fourth CIAM conference (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne) that took place in Athens in the summer of 1933. As we read in the minutes of the congress published in the journal of the Technical Chamber of Greece Technika Chronika (Technical Chronicles), it was at the meeting of 13 August 1933 that CIAM members decided to set up two categories of participants: a) partners (mainly young architects and students of architecture), and b) specific members (non-architects participating as full members). The one and only such member was Otto Neurath. Neurath was invited as a representative of the Mundaneum in Vienna in order to cooperate with the CIAM Committee of Statistics which had as its task to collect, review and process statistical data relating to some of the most important cities of the Western world. As noted in the minutes of the congress: ‘The Committee of Statistics in cooperation with the Vienna Mundaneum will collect, review and edit the necessary statistical material which will remain as the property of the Conference.’

Fondé sur un aller-retour entre projet et expérience, le design est une activité fondamentalement contextuelle, dont la signification reste suspendue à son inscription dans une histoire collective. Le design semble à ce titre partager certaines propriétés avec le langage. Il est alors possible de tracer des correspondances entre le milieu linguistique et notre relation au monde, en tant qu’elle passe, non pas par les objets eux-mêmes, mais par la pratique des objets que le design a en charge de faire exister. Car c’est bien cette notion de pratique, dans son acception linguistique et anthropologique qui semble déterminer la possibilité pour l’objet de faire sens, et donc son appartenance même à cette catégorie d’« objet de design » si difficile à circonscrire.
Il s’agira alors de s’attarder sur les limites et conséquences de cette proximité, à la lumière de notions comme celles de jeu de langage, d’usage et de signification, historiquement explorées dans le champ de la philosophie analytique.
Nous verrons avec le projet Isotype, mené à partir des années 1920 par Otto Neurath, membre du cercle de Vienne, un exemple de transposition de modèles linguistiques au design graphique, qui trouvera sa postérité dans le travail de Ruedi Baur, posant ainsi les fondements d’une définition du design affranchie des critères stylistiques et des cloisonnements auxquels l’histoire de la discipline a souvent tenté de nous habituer.

Cette étude entend souligner l’influence méconnue de la pensée de Rudolf Carnap sur le développement de disciplines ou de dispositifs participant de la révolution numérique et qui, à des titres divers, poursuivent un projet apparenté à la philosophie. Nous retraçons le parcours de Carnap, marqué par deux idées majeures sur lesquelles les interprètes ont récemment attiré l’attention : le principe de tolérance et la notion d’explication (explication). Les développements de l’intelligence artificielle, de l’ingénierie des connaissances (ou knowledge representation) et du Web sémantique demandent en effet à être confrontés à ces aspects saillants de la pensée carnapienne, afin d’en démontrer la pertinence mais aussi les limites.

The aim of this paper is to give a biographical, historical, and philosophical reconstruction of Neurath's final years in England. Besides reconstructing Neurath's arrival to England, in the context of his life and philosophical introduction at Oxford, I will argue that since the 1930s, Neurath was eager to develop a brand for logical empiricism. This brand was based not on theoretical commitments, but on practical considerations and decisions. Using a detailed case study on Neurath's relation to the Hungarian sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim, I show that the development of their connections documents how Neurath gave more and more priority to practical aims during his English years. Finally, the concluding section points to some further considerations on Neurath's legacy.

La pregunta sobre qué modalidades de ver presenta la Autobiografía visual, texto póstumo de Otto Neurath, es el punto central de este estudio. Éste se examina mediante tres temas planteados en la Autobiografía: las experiencias del ver, la educación visual y la democratización del conocimiento. Las distinciones conceptuales entre "lo visible" y "lo visual," el "tomar posición" y "tomar partido", propuestas por Didi-Huberman, serán referencias importantes para trabajar tales temas, ya que permiten mostrar las tensiones en el acto de ver que la Autobiografía presenta. Se concluye con una reflexión introductoria sobre las formas con las cuales la arquitectura sigue activando algunas de las propuestas más problemáticas de Neurath, a saber, la relación que establece entre su lenguaje gráfico y el fortalecimiento de las sociedades democráticas, presentándose, por último, la video-instalación Deep Play , de Farocki, como contraposición para reconsiderar la diferencia entre "tomar posición" y "tomar partido".

The vision behind this project is to recall the extraordinary work of Otto Neurath and provide means to adapt his visual language to the Web in order to make visible the process that led to the Anthropocene and map the living conditions of the age and the knowledge infrastructure behind such an endeavor. Many scientists agree that we have entered a geological epoch called the Anthropocene which is the direct consequence of human activity. It signals the beginning of a time of transformations resulting from the degrading living conditions on the planet. It challenges us to urgently reshape our perception of the world in a shareable way. This crisis is all-encompassing and requires new perceptive devices mixing epistemic value and the esthetic capacity of noticing and representing phenomena that escapes unequipped perception. This is something Neurath understood very well as he surrounded himself with artists like Gerd Arntz to publish a series of books that would make visible the process of modernization before the WWII. To understand the advent of the Anthropocene, we wish to synthetize the sociology of science pioneered by Neurath with recent works in STS. While the former was centered on modernization and development, the latter explores their consequences. Charting the entities which jointly and often conflictingly inhabit and produce our surroundings has become a vital step towards accounting for the planet's components and their agencies so as to help us imagine and design new policies and forms of life. With the help of our current knowledge infrastructure (the Web) we wish to build visual tools, working across academic boundaries to mix art and scientific knowledge, like Neurath did by setting up an interdisciplinary institute. Our goal is to draw a picture of the world we dwell in and examine the process of how we got there and explore what awaits the digital infrastructure that enabled this project-a blind spot beyond the promises of digital technology.

L'empirisme logique, mouvement incontournable dans l'histoire de la philosophie analytique, apparut dans l'entre-deux-guerres viennois comme une réaction progressiste à la pensée méta-physique. Continuant la mission des Lumières, ce mouvement moderniste est représenté par le Cercle de Vienne formé de Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap et Otto Neurath, entre autres scientifiques. Ce livre invite à une réflexion sur la dimension politique méconnue de l'empirisme logique à travers la vie et l'oeuvre d'Otto Neurath (1881-1945), figure notable de « l'aile gauche » du Cercle. Il examine comment les travaux innovatifs de Neurath en matière d'infographisme, sa vision pédagogique et son socialisme s'articulent autour de la philosophie néo-empiriste des sciences.

Current studies on the « Left Vienna Circle » (LVC) question the political function of neopositivism from a historical point of view. As a reaction to Frankfurt School critics which identify the Enlightenment spirit of the logical empiricism as a dogmatic defense of status quo, these historiographs show the socialist content of this philosophy. Their studies insist on the institutional and symbolic role that scientific method played in the context of Red Vienna. I treat the LVC empiricism as a reflection of the questioning on the function of science and scientists in the social move towards socialism.

Although now largely forgotten, the international language movement was, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, a matter of widespread public interest, as well as a concern of numerous scientists and scholars. The primary goal was to establish a language for international communication, but in the early twentieth century an increasing accent was placed on philosophical considerations: wanted was a language better suited to the needs of modern science and rational thought. In this paper, we examine the example of the English scholar C.K. Ogden's international language Basic English and his efforts to win the Vienna Circle philosophers Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap over to the project. Basic is shown to be an implementation of key ideas in Ogden's philosophy of language, ideas shared to a large extent with Neurath and Carnap. This we see through an examination of their unpublished correspondence, as well as through the collaboration that emerged between Ogden and Neurath, in which Neurath's Isotype, a system for graphically representing statistical data, became closely aligned with Basic. Through the ideas and endeavours we investigate here, we gain a new perspective on this crucial period in the history of analytic philosophy.

In the genealogy of logical empiricism, the so-called "First Vienna Circle" (Neurath, Frank, Hahn) has been considered an essential episode, connecting the philosophy of Mach and the French conventionalists with the later logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle around Schlick. The present paper makes three claims: (1) We make the historical claim that the lack of archival sources on the "First Vienna Circle" does not allow a reliable reconstruction of such a discussion group, and even allows some doubts about its existence, at least as a regular discussion group. (2) We emphasize the interaction of the young Neurath, Hahn and Frank, in Vienna around 1910, with a group of philosophers strongly influenced by Meinong and claim that this interaction was very advantageous for a reception of the new symbolic logic and especially of Russell´s philosophy of logic and mathematics. New archival sources permit us to reconstruct such an interaction. (3) We claim that this Meinongian context in Vienna shaped some philosophical positionss of Neurath and Hahn, especially their view of the nature of logic and mathematics. We claim that at least Neurath, but probably also Hahn, endorsed a logical realism similar to that of Russell and Meinong. It was only after the reception of the Tractatus in the Vienna Circle that such a logical realism was unanimously rejected by the logical empiricists. Besides the obvious influence of Mach and the French conventionalists on the young Neurath, Hahn and Frank, this heritage from the Meinong school should be taken into account in an evaluation of the early philosophies of our mentioned trio.

The Viennese Otto Neurath (1882-1945) , once stigmatized as a volcanic revolutionary, poor in theory as rich in reforming enthusiasm, has only recently been rediscovered as an economist and his economic writings have been republished and partially translated in English . This paper analyzes the early years of Otto Neurath’s scientific activity, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when particular attention was given by him to war economics.
Otto Neurath excluded any kind of ethical prejudice from restricting economic analysis. Acquiring methods as war and smuggling should, in his view, be studied exactly as market exchange and production. “That pillage – he wrote – is prohibited by law, should not impede economists from studying it. Why should the consequences of trade and domestic manufacture be worth to be analyzed, while the effects of smuggling are ignored? In consequence of such considerations war has been vastly ignored by economists as a form of acquisition (…)”  .
Far away from any interventionist stance, Neurath considered the Balkan wars and WWI as an extraordinary occasion to gather information  about the emerging of barter trade, even at international level , the centralized administration of production, the controlled distribution of consumption goods and the destabilizing or even vanishing of financial systems. His extraordinary efforts in this field were recognized not only with a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an official commendation from the Austrian government, but also with the appointment as director of the Museum of War Economy in Leipzig in 1916 .
Above all, studying a war economy in its development meant, for Neurath, the possibility to demonstrate that a certain grade of administrative control over the economy, based on a general system of in-kind calculations, could prevent what he considered the worst trait of market economies: economic crises. An isotype in particular, of his volume of 1939, bears testimony of such stance. The image illustrates a statistic on coal production in the United States between 1914 and 1936, underlining how in 1917, a year of war, production steadily remained on its maximum capacity, showing no sign of seasonal or cyclical fluctuation.
As early as 1913, in his essay: Probleme der Kriegswirtschaftslehre , Neurath went a step further: “The present underemployment of existing forces, that is typical of our Ordnung, incites to war: it is necessary, for example, to defend oneself from foreign wares and foreign laborers or oblige others to buy our wares or accept our workers, and all of this because it is not spontaneous to enter in cooperative relations between states; furthermore it is easy to alleviate the costs of war thanks to reparations; and lastly because at times war frees productive forces that would otherwise be bound. The uneconomic construction of our Lebensordnung is the cause why at present war causes lesser evils than in a more economical Lebensordnung the case would be”  .
To eradicate war, in Neurath’s view, mankind had only two alternatives. The first would have been to render it uneconomical. A second opportunity to foster peace, obviously, would have been to abandon the present inefficient Lebensordnung for a more effective one. To decide, though, which Lebensordnung to implement in reality was not the task of an economist. Neurath continued so, instead, to offer to the attention of politicians economic organizational alternatives to market economy, all the while steadily collecting statistical data and transforming it in easily understandable isotypes, in order to enable the largest possible strata of population to decide about their future.

This paper is a critique of coercive theories of meaning, that is, theories (or criteria) of meaning  designed to do down ones opponents by representing their views as meaningless or unintelligible.  Many philosophers from Hobbes through Berkeley and Hume to the pragmatists, the logical positivists and (above all)  Wittgenstein have devised such theories and criteria in order to discredit their opponents. I argue 1) that such theories and criteria are morally  obnoxious, a) because they smack of the totalitarian linguistic tactics of the Party in Orwell’s 1984 and b) because they dehumanize  the opposition  by portraying them as mere spouters of gibberish;  2) that they are profoundly illiberal since  if true, they would undermine Mill’s arguments for free speech; 3) that such theories are prone to self-contradiction, pragmatic and otherwise; 4) that they often turn against their creators including what they were meant to exclude and excluding what they were meant to include; 5) that such theories are susceptible to a modus tollens pioneered by  Richard Price in his Review Concerning the Principle Questions of Morals(1758); and 6)  that  such theories are prima facie false since they fail to ‘predict’ the data that is it their business to explain (or, in the case of criteria, fail to capture the concept that they allegedly  represent).  The butcher’s bill is quite considerable:  some of Hobbes, a fair bit of Locke, half of Berkeley, large chunks of Hume, Russell's Theory of Types, verificationism in its positivist and Dummettian variants, much of pragmatism and most of Wittgenstein - all these have to be sacrificed if we are to save our souls as philosophic liberals.

In Neurath's letters to Morris, he identifies "certain differences between him and Carnap. I suggest that the differences leading to a conflict between Neurath and Carnap can be explained, at least partly, in terms of the van Heijernoort–Hintikka dichotomy of language as calculus vs. language as the universal media. Neurath promoted meta-theoretical systematisations early on, while for Carnap, the adoption of that point of view required a long incubation period I argue, furthermore, that Neurath’s calculistic position shows up in his attempts to establish a standard for a pictorial language of communication, the Isotype system.