Review of History of Philosophy of Science Books

Otto Neurath’s Educational Story in Pictures and Texts Otto Neurath:  From hieroglyphics to Isotype: a visual autobiography.  Edited by Matthew Eve and Christopher Burke. Devizes: Perpensa Press, 2019, pp. xxxii + 191. Paperback ISBN 978-1-9160539-1-5.  £25.00 Otto Neurath (1882-1945) is one of the strangest figures in the history of so-called analytic philosophy. For many decades, during his lifetime and even during the second half of the twentieth century, he was viewed as a clumsy propagandist, an ardent defender of Marxism and thus as a philosophically irrelevant social scientist, an organizer and perhaps as an educator. Philosophers, who thought that his papers lacked the basic philosophical skills – namely precise argumentation, sharp definitions and clear identification of problems – often described him in hostile terms. It might be not at all accidental or surprising that Neurath fell from the canon of analytic philosophy almost immediately after his death.