Volume 2, Issue 4: On the Streets of Prague: Frank, Carnap and the Forms of Positivism

On the Streets of Prague: Frank, Carnap and the Forms of Positivism

Radek Schuster (ed.), The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, Volume 23., Cham: Springer, 2020. xii-204 pp. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-36383-3; Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-36382-6.

When one is considering how analytic philosophy became an international movement, the Vienna Circle has a very special place in the story. Although Bertrand Russell’s works were translated into many languages quite early, and he traveled a lot and he was read in almost every country of Europe (not speaking of the United States and Asia), the Vienna Circle shows even more signs of internationality.

            Members of the Vienna Circle around Moritz Schlick came mainly from Mid- and Eastern Europe (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary), but the Circle had regular and returning visitors from abroad: from the United States, England, Finland, Sweden, Poland, and China. Also, members of the Circle lectured around the Globe from the United States to Russia, and thus spread the words of positivism whenever and wherever they could. But besides some occasional contacts to France, Italy, Holland, and Denmark, Czechoslovakia might be an extremely interesting case in the internationalization of logical empiricism.

            Prague was a center of big scholarly and cultural life at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Having taught at the university Mach and Einstein, writing their Kafka and many others, Prague was a multicultural city, a melting pot of Germans, Czechs, and Slovaks – resembling Vienna in many respects. It might come then as no big surprise that Frank was happy to go there to occupy Einstein’s vacant chair in 1912. Frank stayed there until 1938 and for almost a decade to bring there at least one more positivist. It was first Hans Reichenbach, but in time Carnap replaced Reichenbach and arrived there late 1931 and stayed in Prague (with many lecture tours abroad) until December 1935. Frank’s substantive almost three decades and Carnap’s major four years (culminating in his famous Logische Syntax der Sprache) shall deserve an own book.

            Finally, after being for many years in preparation, we got it as The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia, edited by Radek Schuster. While many will be happy with the volume – which indeed contains interesting gems – many shall stay in desperation and hunger for more details and studies. The book is divided into three separate parts; Part 1 is the usual collection of articles; Part II contains personal reflections and recollections, while Part 3 is again the usual review section of the Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook series. I will just quickly summarize from a bird’s eye view the articles in Part 1, and save my critical comments for the second part of this review.

            Papers of Part 1 are not ordered thematically, temporally, or anyhow, and thus one could start the volume with any of the papers that got his/her attention. But in fact, the first two chapters provide a quite helpful background and context to situate logical positivism of the 1930s in Prague. Jan Šebestík (Ch. 1) describes the main features and ideas of Bolzano, Mach, and Thomas G. Masaryk and compares them to Carnap and Wittgenstein to point out not actual lines of direct influences, but to show that Czechoslovakia absorbed many ideas of scientific philosophy even before logical positivists arrive. “The Czech lands were the incubator of our modernity” (p. 32) claims that author. Miloš Kratochvíl gives, on the other hand, a somewhat counter-narrative. He shows that positivism arrived in different (at least in three) waves to Czech intellectual life, and while the first two were absorbed and welcomed by many, logical positivism did not meet the specific requirement to became influential in itself. The reason, Kratochvíl argues, is that “Czech positivism had never been a ‘pure’ positivism: it always contained psychological, social, political and moral dimension” (p. 39) contrary to the positivism of the Vienna Circle. Or as he put it in his conclusion,

The question why, in its third period, Czech positivists did not absorb the new impulses emanating from the Vienna Circle, can now be answered. In my opinion, the answer lies in the fact that the most influential exponents of Czech positivism were not natural scientists: they expected that philosophy would and should provide a conception of the world, inclusive of moral certainty. Moreover, Czech positivists were not as hostile to metaphysics. (p. 49)

I will come back later to the issue of why this is all very misleading in this straight form.

            One might think that papers come in dual, that is, after having two papers on the background of positivism in Czechoslovakia, setting the scene and context for further elaborations, Chapters 3 and 4 considers some actual work by positivists done in Prague, again touching upon the local people and connections. In Chapter 3, Veronika Hofer discusses Philipp Frank’s years in Prague, showing how Frank was embedded in the cultural and scientific milieu of the city and of the German University of Prague. In the next chapter, Michael Stöltzner reconstructs the local and international context of the logical positivists’ first international meeting in Prague, the first conference on the “Epistemology of the Exact Sciences”. 

            The book gets a somewhat strange turn after this, however, as Chapter 5, Jaroslav Peregrin’s “Rudolf Carnap’s Inferentialism” is a contemporary and systematic discussion on the inferentialist interpretation of Carnap’s syntax and semantics. With Chapter 6, with travel back to Czechoslovakia a bit as Tomáš Hříbek compares Otto Neurath with Karel Teige. Similarly to Šebestík, the author does not provide actual and direct influence-lines (though the possibility is raised several times) but shows how the architectural and technological ideas of Neurath and Teige compares to each other against their shared background of Marxism and (eclectic) modernism.

            Chapter 7 (written by Jakub Mácha and Jan Zouhar) is a discussion of Arnošt Kolman’s Marxist critique of “mathematical fetishism” which means that mathematics (and logic as well) is detached from its origins and natural characteristics, that is “[m]athematical principles are proclaimed to be the principles of all being” (pp. 136-137). Kolman detects such an ontological view among logical positivists, logical atomists, and, in fact, among all those who declared a substantial status for logic and mathematics in scientific and philosophical inquiry between 1900 and 1940. Finally, Chapter 8 discusses “Igor Hrušovský on Social Sciences” by Juraj Hvorecký; Hrušovský was a Slovakian philosopher – thus this piece constitutes a really interesting dimension against the Czech dominance in the volume – who was influenced by logical positivists and wrote a lot about biology, and how biology influenced the social sciences as well in the context of Driesch’s vitalism. According to Hvorecký, “Hrušovský is not only familiar with and skillful with uses of the output of Circle personalities, he is also using it in a novel and inspiring ways. If the Vienna Circle has an ally in Czechoslovakia, it is definitely Hrušovský” (p. 162).

            This is a sentence that one was waiting for during the whole book. As it can be seen already from this very sketchy and quick overview of the chapters, most authors discuss the historical background, or individual achievements (either historically or systematically), or produces general comparisons between different authors. It should be added that one would learn a lot from each of the chapters, that is for sure, but one would not necessarily get a detailed and cautiously reconstructed picture or elaboration of “The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia”. For example, it is not at all evident how many authors view the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism itself. As we recall, Jan Šebestík claimed that the conception of the Vienna Circle did not found fertile ground in Czechoslovakia because the positivism of the Czechs, that would have served as a genuine and helpful background for Carnap and others, was “never a ‘pure’ positivism: it always contained psychological, social, political, and moral dimension” (p. 39). But if we have learned anything in the last two decades about the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism is that it was (almost) never pure and it contained psychological, social, political, and moral dimensions. (In fact, a forthcoming volume of the same series is entitled The Socio-Ethical Dimension of Knowledge: The Mission of Logical Empiricism, edited by Christian Damböck and Adam Tamas Tuboly).

            Similar mistreatment is to be found in Mácha and Zouhar’s chapter where they critically assess Kolman’s reception of logical positivism and discuss the idea that discourse about a language requires a metalanguage, which in turn requires a meta-metalanguage and so on. But all of this is done in the context of the Aufbau when Carnap did have this distinction, not even in the forthcoming period during the first years of the Syntax-project. Perhaps not the most important point, but still shows that this Carnap of the chapter might be not the actual, or historical Carnap.

            Finally, there is Tomáš Hříbek’s paper, which is, in general, a very neat and useful comparison between Neurath and Teige’s architectural ideas (Neurath’s views on architecture and urban planning are still highly underappreciated, though the efforts of Sophie Hochhäusl and Nader Vossoughian). Nonetheless, one of the main concepts that are used by Hříbek to connect Neurath and Teige (and which was used previously to disconnect them) is Marxism, and it is highly underdeveloped. While Hříbek uses the recent literature on Neurath and works with a refined picture of him, he leaves the notion of Marxism almost undefined and given that in the era Marxism had many-many different versions and dimensions of articulation (even in one such city as Vienna) one feels that some more attention should have given to this issue.

            But these are particular issues and cases, and one could have overcome them if a comprehensive narrative or idea would have emerged from the volume. Nonetheless, such papers as Peregrin’s (however detailed, convincing it is, and I one hundred percent agree with Peregrin’s inferentialist reading of Carnap, as I have already pushed the same issue previously in a paper), does not help much to assess the Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia. Did Prague have any influence on Carnap during his writing of the Syntax book that contains his inferentialist ideas? If not, then only a quite contingent spatial overlap is what we have in the context of Carnap’s book and Prague. But Prague had a linguistic circle, and it is known from Carnap’s diaries that he presented his Syntax there; although only after the book’s publication. Thus there is no direct evidence of Carnap’s contact with Prague’s structuralist linguists, but an indirect one could be assumed nevertheless. That line of reasoning would have resulted in a very informative and helpful guide to the actual relations between the Vienna Circle and Czechoslovakia’s scientists.

            Carnap was more active, however, in the Mathematical Circle (Mathematisches Kränzchen), where he presented three lectures (one on Hilbert, another on Gödel, and one about general axiomatics) and attended many others; but this fact is not even mentioned in the book. Furthermore, Carnap gave talks in Bratislava and Brünn (1934) and lectures in Prague about “the way of scientific philosophy” in the Urania (Prague’s German Society which aimed at communicating scientific results to a broader public), and also touched upon the “sociological function of metaphysics in the present” at the Society of Socialist Academics. These are important historical events and it would have required at least one paper that goes after the presence of Carnap in the press, the influence, and further dimension of Carnap’s lectures.

            The same goes for Frank; it is known that Frank occasionally presented papers for Prague’s local presses and newspapers about the scientific worldview and metaphysics, but his influence is less treated. Nonetheless, Hofer’s paper is one of the best in the volume as it actually describes and evaluates Frank’s local relations, friendships, and colleagues. The paper is very instructive to see how Frank became known in Prague, what type of philosophical, scientific, and social fights he had to deal with. Hofer also hints “the reading of Frank’s book [The Law of Causality] as a situated knowledge claim which expressed his handling of his social-political, as well as his intellectual situation in Prague” (p. 60).

            What is painfully missing is the 8th International Congress of Philosophy (2-7 September 1934) and the satellite “The Preliminary Conference of the International Congresses for the Unity of Science in Prague 1934. In accordance with the socially interested view of Czech philosophers, one of the main topics of the congress was the status of democracy in Europe (after the rise of Nazism). One would expect that given the socially engaged character of logical positivism, the many Viennese philosophers who gave talks at the big Congress made a good appearance. That was not the case, however. After the Congress, the Hungarian philosopher István Boda described his experience of the event in general, and regarding the sections on logic in particular, in the Hungarian journal Athenaeum. He claimed that those who expected any guidance or deeper wisdom from philosophy would have been disappointed by the logic sections: “most of the logisticians are completely alien towards the reality of life: their whole field of problems lies outside the world of ‘reality’” (Boda 1935, pp. 76-77). For a congress that purported to address questions of democracy and its enemies in the 1930s, it seems surprising that a significant part of the event was limited to abstract and otherworldly concerns. More importantly, at least for our present considerations, Boda also drew some social conclusions:

The huge number of logistic presentations, as well as the extraordinary and surprisingly big attention towards them, could already be interpreted in itself as a characteristic sign of the times (especially as a tendency that is contrary to the official [socio-political] goals of the congress): the philosophical concern of the most modern today does not dive into the reality of life in order to reform it in accordance with the products of wisdom and philosophy, but wants to get ever further away from the sad world of today – and instead dives into the abstract world of “cold” signs and equations of mathematical logic that is alien to any life and “reality”. (Boda 1935, p. 77; my translation.)

Boda seems to imply that the turn towards the “cold signs of mathematics” (or, as they were called in the famous Viennese manifesto, “the icy slopes of logic”), was itself an expression of socio-political considerations. If logical empiricism, as a logistic movement, entailed such a withdrawal from public life, then it was already making a move into the space of social concerns.

            Thus, this event would have been a nice opportunity, along the with pre-conference of Neurath and Frank, to analyze in the volume, to see the local reactions, power-relations and to find out how logical positivism was situated in Czechoslovakia in practice and not just in abstract volumes.

            The volume also has a second part, which contains two recollections. The first came from Nina Holton (wife of the physicist-historian-philosopher Gerald Holton, who was a colleague of Frank at Harvard in the 1950s) “On Hania Frank”. Hania, who is occasionally mentioned in the literature as Frank’s wife, turns out to be a sparkling personality; all the stories and photos, reproduced in the volume (but if you want high-quality pictures, go for the Ebook as the printed pictures are just useless) testifies to the rich social life of the Franks in the Prague. A short, but dense reading of a cultural era from which you could learn a lot about sociability and history. The second recollection came from Ladislav Tondl, the famous Czech philosopher (of science), who died in 2015, thus shortly after the conference on which this volume is based. He delivers many interesting notes, anecdotes, and philosophical remarks about the twentieth-century role and place of analytic philosophy. It would also be a useful source, especially for the Central European interactions in analytic philosophy.

            Finally, the volume is closed with three reviews (of Christian Damböck’s book that was reviewed here as well; of Stepan Ivanyk’s book of the Lvov-Warsaw School, and of Monika Gruber’s edition of Tarski’s semantic works) and with a short obituary of Robert S. Cohen (1923-2017) who passed away a few years ago. The book has the usual cover, typesetting, and appearance that fits the series, although, and sadly along the lines of Springer’s general attention, with a lot of typos.

            All in all, despite all the critical remarks, the book indeed contains many gems from which you could learn a lot, either historically, or conceptually. The lack of a general vision, narrative, or short case studies in a fine-grained mood of local relations that would explain macro events, tells against it, but if you could manage for yourself to pick up the right arguments and lines, The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia is a useful volume, with a lot of work in it, and more importantly, with a lot of promises of future research. If Einstein’s one year in Prague deserved recently a whole, big volume, then the Vienna Circle will deserve a similar one as well: it should be a marvelous story to tell that after Frank writing a letter to Neurath about metaphysics, ideology, and physics, he went through the city of Prague with Hania, perhaps singing and dancing, meeting Kafka on the terrace of a café along the way to Fanta Berta’s famous salon. It would be also fun to know whether Frank held a copy of Svejk or Lenin in his hands. As a start, go for Radek Schuster’s book!

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Supported by the MTA Lendulet Morals and Science Research group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship.