The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle
David Edmonds
Nov 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Rick Adamson
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12 hr 5 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle-an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick-and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat.
About the author
David Edmonds is coauthor, with John Eidinow, of the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker as well as Rousseau's Dog and Bobby Fischer Goes to War, and the author of Would You Kill the Fat Man? He is a research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and an award-winning presenter and producer for the BBC.
Rick Adamson is an Audie Award winner for his work on In a Heartbeat by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy (with Sally Jenkins) of The Blind Side fame. Also the winner of several ALA awards and a Harper Audio Grammy nominee, Rick has been a narrator for twenty-five years. Originally from Maryland, he now lives in New Jersey.
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