Schlick, Friedrich Albert Moritz (1882–1936)

Moritz Schlick is usually remembered as the leader of the Vienna Circle, a group that flourished from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, and made an important contribution to the philosophical movement known as ‘logical empiricism’. Yet many of Schlick’s most original contributions to philosophy antedated the hey-day of the Circle, providing the foundations for much of its subsequent development. He started his academic career as a physicist, and his early contributions to philosophy include an influential conventionalist interpretation of general relativity and a new account of the definitions of the basic terms of theoretical science. In the debates that flourished within the Vienna Circle he is famous for his commitment to the Principle of Verifiability and his defence of a correspondence theory of truth. In addition, his works during the final years of the Vienna Circle represent some of the most sober reflections on the problems that vexed the early logical empiricists. Although few of the views identified with logical empiricism currently find favour among philosophers, their approach to philosophy, especially their identification of its central perplexities, still wields enormous influence among contemporary thinkers. Since Schlick contributed significantly to the form logical empiricism assumed during its period of dominance, there can be little doubt that his thought continues to inspire much philosophical thinking today.