A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #3–The Death of Moritz Schlick.

(Schuringa, 2025)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Myth of Socially Disconnected Analytic Philosophy

3. The Death of Moritz Schlick

4. The Vienna Circle Takes On the German Philosophical Society

5. Otto Neurath

6. Rudoph Carnap

7. Hans Hahn

8. Philipp Frank

9. Edgar Zilsel

10. Rose Rand

11. Susan Stebbing

12. Russell and Moore

13. Michael Dummett

14. Schuringa’s Philosophical Hallucinations

15. Analytic Philosophy in the Cold War Deep Freezer

16. Analytic Philosophy and Angela Davis

17. Jean van Heijenoort

18. Noam Chomsky

19. On the Origins of Neoliberalism and Austrian Economics

20. On the Philosophical Roots of the “Dark Enlightenment”

21. The Horkheimer-Neurath Reconciliation Attempt

22. The Punch Bowl Revisited

REFERENCES

The following essay,* by EJ Spode,** will be published here in 22 installments; this, the third, contains section 3.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #3

3. The Death of Moritz Schlick

All Schuringa says about this critical event is that “Schlick was murdered by a mentally ill student in 1936.” Full stop. And well, the student probably was mentally ill, but it ignores the way that the right-wing press in Vienna celebrated Schlick’s murder. His murder, and the response to it in the press, are illuminating, for they show the kind of world that the Vienna Circle was inhabiting, how completely radical they were in that context, and the horrific abuse they had to endure because of their philosophical stance. It is somewhat surprising that Schuringa skips this event entirely, as I would have thought they would be the centerpiece of any social history of Analytic philosophy.

There are two very fascinating books about this topic: by The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, by David Edmonds (Edmonds, 2020), and Exact Thinking in Demented Times, by Karl Sigmund (Sigmund, 2017).

(Edmonds, 2020) (Sigmund, 2017)

As both books report, there was a cascade of articles in the local Vienna media, using the murder of Schlick to put the philosophers of the Vienna Circle on trial in the court of public opinion. The real victim, they seemed to be arguing, was the killer.

For example, on July 10, the Linzer Volksblatt ran an article condemning Schlick for corrupting “the fine porcelain of the national character.” This bit is fleshed out by Sigmund, in Exact Thinking in Demented Times:

In the daily Linzer Volksblatt, one Bernhard Birk wrote about the problematic activities of Moritz Schlick: “For a full fourteen years, young, tender flowers of humanity were forced to drink from the poisonous vial of positivism as if it were the very water of life. The effect must have been horrible.” Robust souls would simply throw up, said Birk. However, “there also exist delicately organized minds, fragile porcelain from the roots of the Volk, patriotic children of the Austrian soil, people who yearn for the beautiful and the noble. To pour the doctrine of positivism into these wide-open minds is like pouring chloric or nitric acid down their throats.”

Two days later, in the intellectual weekly paper Schönere Zukunft (Better Future), came out with this:

The Jew is a born anti-metaphysician and loves logicality, mathematicality, formalism, and positivism in philosophy—in other words, all the characteristics that Schlick embodied to the highest degree. We would like to point out, however, that we are Christians living in a Christian German state, and that it is up to us to determine which philosophy is good and appropriate.

This was followed by a lengthy article under the pen name “Prof. Dr. Austriacus.”

Edmonds describes the thesis of the article as follows: Nelböck (the killer) had been turned into a psychopath by Schlick’s radically destructive philosophy. This loathsome philosophy was antireligious and anti-metaphysical. The bullet that had killed Schlick was “not guided by the logic of some lunatic looking for a victim, but rather by the logic of a soul, deprived of its meaning of life.”

The Vienna Circle, the article continued, had come to be seen abroad as representing Austrian philosophy, “much to the disadvantage of Austria’s reputation as a Christian state.” But Schlick had not pursued his philosophical project alone, of course. Among his collaborators was his “close friend,” the communist Otto Neurath.

As Edmonds notes, the article didn’t say that Schlick was Jewish (he wasn’t). But the assumption (or allegation) was plain. If not a Jew, Schlick was at the very least Jew- adjacent; he was philosophically aligned with them. He represented a degenerate Jewish strain of thought. Among other charges directed at Schlick in the article was the claim that he had Jewish research assistants (Friedrich Waismann and two Jewish women). The article concluded that while killing was not strictly speaking a good thing, perhaps some good would come from the killing:

Let the Jews have their Jewish philosophers at their Cultural Institute! But the philosophical chairs at the University of Vienna in Christian-German Austria should be held by Christian philosophers! It has been declared on numerous occasions recently that a peaceful solution of the Jewish question in Austria is also in the interest of the Jews themselves, since a violent solution of that question would be unavoidable otherwise. It is to be hoped that the terrible murder at the University of Vienna will quicken efforts to find a truly satisfactory solution of the Jewish Question.

Prof. Dr. Austriacus is believed to have been Johann Sauter, a philosopher at the University of Vienna, a Kantian, a Nazi, and an ally of Othmar Spann, the ultranationalist sociologist and economist.

It is not surprising that Schuringa would want to bury all this, as his own critique of Analytic philosophy reads as if it were cribbed from those articles celebrating the death of Schlick. All you have to do is replace the word “Jew” with the phrase “Analytic philosopher”: “The [Analytic philosopher] is a born anti-metaphysician and loves logicality, mathematicality, formalism, and positivism in philosophy.”

Once again, Schuringa glosses all of this as “Schlick was killed by a mentally ill student.” Full stop. That’s your social history.