““What is the Vienna Circle?” is a question which is neither rhetorical nor trivial. It is perhaps an attempt to ‘square the circle’ – which is, meanwhile, mathematically possible, as Karl Menger described as early as 1934.
This question might be also a problem of how the whole relates logically to the parts or the parts to the whole, which was already addressed by mereology (whole-part theory) according to Stanislaw (1916).
Of course, we are all familiar with the irritating fact that one and the same phenomenon can be described consistently by more than one theory”
underdetermination of a theory by observation
Source: "What is the Vienna Circle?" 2006, p. xi
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Friedrich Stadler5
Austrian historian 1951Related quotes
Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician
The Ethic of Freethought (Mar 6, 1883)
Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist
Kurt Koffka (1931), self-cited in: Kurt Koffka. Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 22
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher
Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section I On The Idea Of A World In General
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)
Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic
Source: Diophantos of Alexandria: A Study in the History of Greek Algebra (1885), Ch. II, p.37
Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character, Vol. 123, No. 792 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1929.0094 (6 April 1929) <br class="br">Context: The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.
Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 73