The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle

“It’s not a crime novel, but an account of how the influential school of positivism—secular, empirical, and contemptuous of metaphysics—flourished in the 1930s. The book vividly brings alive the leading lights from Gödel to Wittgenstein, some of whom were pretty eccentric. It was all in the shade of a deteriorating political landscape. The shooting of Moritz Schlick, considered the Circle’s founder, on the steps of the university in 1936, was followed by the group’s decline with the flight into exile of its leading members.” Read more...

The best books on Austria

Nicholas Parsons, Historian

“What David has managed to do is combine the biographical and historical with the philosophical, without getting too technical. A lot of the philosophy of the Vienna Circle was quite hard core, but he doesn’t get bogged down in the details. This is a book that’s accessible to a general reader. He’s very good about making clear what the importance of the debates they were having was, what their limitations were, why they were or were not influential, as well as telling these stories which connect very strongly with the rise of Nazism, including the murder of the title of the book.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2020

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher