Analytic & pragmatist · 1882–1936
Moritz Schlick
Physicist-philosopher who led the Vienna Circle
Philosophy is not a body of doctrines but the activity of clarifying meaning, and the meaning of a statement is the way it would be verified. He was shot dead by a former student at the University of Vienna in 1936.
Life and thought
Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) took his doctorate in physics under Max Planck in Berlin (1904) and wrote one of the first philosophical accounts of Einstein’s relativity (1917). Appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in Vienna in 1922, he gathered mathematicians, scientists and philosophers into a discussion group that in 1929 announced itself publicly as the Vienna Circle. On 22 June 1936 he was shot dead on the university stairs by a former student, Johann Nelböck; after the Nazi annexation of Austria, Nelböck was released early.
Schlick held that philosophy is not a science with results of its own but the activity of making the meaning of statements clear, and that the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification: to understand a sentence is to know what observations would show it true. Questions that no possible experience could settle are not deep but empty. The Circle treated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as a guiding text, and from 1927 Schlick met Wittgenstein regularly, though Wittgenstein never joined the group.