How philosophers in the Czech lands broke ground for the vienna circle

Jan Šebestík

pp. 3-32

in: Radek Schuster (ed), The Vienna circle in Czechoslovakia, Berlin, Springer, 2020

Abstract

Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), philosopher, mathematician and theologian, was the most important figure in Bohemia in the first half of the nineteenth century. In mathematics, he and others put the infinitesimal calculus on firm foundations. His Paradoxes of the Infinite (1851) prepared Cantor's and Dedekind's set theory. His monumental Theory of Science (1837) is an inquiry into the structure of science whose core is formal logic. Contrary to Bolzano's logical apriorism, Ernst Mach (1838–1916) developed science on strictly empiricist foundations.The philosopher, sociologist and politician Thomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) renewed Czech philosophy by his works on suicide and on Marxism. His Concrete Logic (1885 in Czech), a study of the classification of sciences, is conceived in the spirit of Auguste Comte, but against Comte it makes room for psychology as the source of evidence and certainty. The most personal passages reflect discussions with Robert Zimmermann and Edmund Husserl.The thinkers in the Czech lands developed all the ingredients of the doctrines of the Vienna Circle: Bolzano's logic, Mach's empiricism, Mach's opposition to metaphysics, Masaryk's philosophy of language as well as the attention he paid to Marxism and to the social question. The Viennese Otto Neurath always stressed the importance of the scholastic roots of Bolzano's logic which preserved Austria from the Kantian parenthesis and from the excesses of German idealism.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Kant Immanuel

Mach Ernst

Zimmermann Robert

Bolzano Bernard

Comte Auguste

Marx Karl

Neurath Otto

Zimmer Robert