A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #4–The Vienna Circle Takes On the German Philosophical Society.

(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 fourth, contains section 4.

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, #4

4. The Vienna Circle Takes On the German Philosophical Society

While we are in the business of context-setting, let’s back up a few more years and further contextualize Schlick’s murder. As we will see, there were some broader events that help to explain how we got to where we are with the Analytic /Continental split, and a lot of that split has to do with the nature of philosophy in the German-speaking world in the 1930s. That brand of philosophy was not in a good place, and a great conflict was already in motion by 1933. Here is how Peter Galison described the philosophical events of that year.

With both Marxists and positivists on the run, the German Philosophical Society celebrated the Nazis’ election to power. Their meeting of October 1933 opened with the collective singing of the “Deutschland Lied” and “The Horst Wessel Song.” Now, the Nazi representative proclaimed, philosophy would be applicable to the people and fulfill the spiritual needs of the Volk. Hitler telegraphed a laudatory greeting, part of which read: “May the forces of true German philosophy contribute to the building and strengthening of the German worldview.” The philosophers complied with talks on Deutschtum, Volk, Soul, and Spirit.

A month prior to this conference, Martin Heidegger had been named rector of Freiburg University. Not only did he publicly celebrate his joining of the National Socialist Party, but he even took to lecturing while wearing a Nazi stormtrooper brown shirt. Heidegger declared,

Adolf Hitler, our great leader and chancellor, with his National Socialist revolution, has created a new German state, which will safeguard for its people the stability and continuity of its history. Heil Hitler! (Heidegger, 1933: vol. 16, p. 151)

About that storm trooper brown shirt—the Sturmabteilung (aka “storm division,”) shirt: In case you forgot, Wikipedia will remind you that the business of the Sturmabteilung was,

protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Roter Frontkämpferbund of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews.

People sometimes argue that Heidegger was just being opportunistic here, and wasn’t really a Nazi Nazi (despite the brown shirt), but this is altogether too charitable. He was clearly in the tank for Hitler two years earlier, as the following Christmas letter to his brother’s family shows.

18th of December, 1931

Dear Fritz, dear Liesl, dear boys,

We would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. It is probably snowing where you are, inspiring the hope that Christmas will once again reveal its true magic. I often think back to the days before Christmas back at home in our little town, and I wish for the artistic energy to truly capture the mood, the splendor, the excitement and anticipation of this time.

[…]

It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.

I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates. (Zielinski, 2016)

Heartwarming.

These developments were the backdrop for the events of 1934, in which many of the Nazi philosophers from the German Philosophical Society would collide with the members of the Vienna Circle at the International Philosophy Congress in Prague, in a pivotal event in the history of Analytic philosophy and one which of course is mentioned nowhere in Schuringa’s book. The Vienna Circle crew arrived in Prague, and they were ready to drop the hammer on the Nazis. Here is how Galison described the event.

Less than a year later, when the Vienna Circle confronted the right-wing philosophers at the International Philosophy Congress in Prague, a clash was inevitable. The principal nationalistic philosophy journal reported excitedly that the Congress had revealed philosophy to be at a turning point, as “a certain Volk” took its place in the development of the World Spirit. One of the heroes of nationalist philosophy, Hans Driesch, presented a plenary lecture, arguing for vitalism and guarding a place for metaphysics. [Driesch would soon be retired for not being Nazi enough.] (Galison, 1990)

Here the Vienna Circle jumped into the fray with what its enemies characterized as a “vehement and well organized attack,” in which the Circle decried metaphysics as meaningless. Viewed from the right, the positivists “stood in the way” of the metaphysical concept of the world that was to underwrite the German worldview. Reichenbach blasted Driesch’s organicism as “mystical,” while Carnap denied that Driesch’s organicism was sufficiently lawlike to make it scientific. Schlick remained silent, but the next day he presented an entire lecture, “On the Concept of the Totality,” in which he claimed that while the distinction between totalities and aggregates might be linguistic or pragmatic, it was not a substantive distinction: there was no whole over and beyond the sum of parts.

Schlick’s paper was abstract on the face of it–something about totalities vs aggregates. But his message was quite clear. There was no Germany above and beyond the individual Germans. People should not be submitting themselves to an abstract metaphysical concept of Germany. Perhaps, to our eyes, his work wasn’t political. To our eyes it was just some shit about totalities and aggregates. But, in that context, it was the most political thing you could possibly say. And hang on to that thought, because it is not always clear what is political and what is not. You cannot make that distinction in a vacuum.

People sometimes want to say that the Nazism of philosophers like Heidegger was distinct from their philosophy. But the members of the Vienna Circle saw it another way. In their view, this was what you got when you started trafficking in metaphysical notions and started talking about abstracta like the Volk. It was a natural outcome of such views. They had been warning people about it for years. Fuck around with metaphysics and find out. It wasn’t just internally bad philosophy. It was bad because of what it led to politically and socially.

In this context, it is obviously absurd to suggest that the members of the Vienna Circle were “ahistorical.” They very much knew their place in the history of Europe, and they very much knew that they were at a historical inflection point. They also knew that their philosophical reflections were not inert in their times. They couldn’t be. Thus, when Schuringa says that Analytic philosophy

tends to think of itself as removed from the changing scenes of history. It acts as if it were pursuing its questions from a vantage point situated nowhere in particular, unaffected by social and political reality,

what he says is not true. It was not true of the members of the Vienna Circle. Nor, as we will see, would it be true of subsequent Analytic philosophers.

Of course, Schuringa’s central project is not to claim that Analytic philosophy is merely culturally inert, but also that it is politically conservative—that it is in the bag for liberal capitalism. As we will see, this claim is false, and it is certainly absurd when applied to the members of the Vienna circle. Many members of the circle were socialists, including Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap, Philipp Frank, Edgar Zilsel, and Hans Hahn. The founding manifesto of The Circle name-checked the Austro-Marxists Max Adler (Wikipedia, 2026a), Otto Bauer (Wikipedia, 2026b), and Rudolf Hilferding (Wikipedia, 2026c). They, and the Circle’s socialists (Neurath et al.) were co-inhabitants of Red Vienna’s institutions—party press, adult education, municipal reform, Ernst Mach Society—sometimes directly interacting, always moving in the same tight ecosystem. Since Schuringa defames these philosophers individually, we will address those defamations individually, and we begin with the case of Otto Neurath.

Download