A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #7–Hans Hahn.

(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 seventh, contains section 5.

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, #7

7. Hans Hahn

The third author of the Circle’s manifesto was Hans Hahn. Hahn is best known as a hardcore mathematician—certainly the most mathematical of the Circle members, with the exception of Gödel, who was Hahn’s student. But despite being very mathematically inclined, Hahn was also a member of the Left Wing of the Circle, perhaps one of the left-most members.

With respect to mathematics, he was all about pure mathematics—especially analysis and related areas. Some of the main things he’s known for are his work on measure theory and integration (he’s known for the Hahn decomposition theorem), functional analysis (super-famous for collaborating with Banach on the Hahn-Banach theorem), and he also did work on ordered groups and series (giving us the Hahn embedding theorem). He also did some work on the foundations/philosophy of mathematics, working on the role of logic in mathematics, the crisis of intuition in mathematics after Cantor, and also wrote about non-constructive proofs.

Hahn was politically aligned with (and often described as a leading intellectual of) the SDAPÖ. He was, in that milieu, a key Social Democratic public intellectual. Like other members of the circle, he was involved with teaching in Volkshochschule Wien (Vienna Workers’ Adult Education/People’s University), bringing modern mathematics and science to the Social Democratic base. He was also one of the central organizers and leading figures in Verein Ernst Mach (the public-facing part of the Vienna Circle, that included public lectures on philosophical topics—basically the TED talks of that era).

We will return to the issue of worker education a bit later, when Chomsky wonders what exactly happened to that, and asks why the left abandoned such initiatives. It is a good question. But for now, we need to view this effort through the headspace of Hahn and the other members of the Left Wing of the Vienna Circle. This education in mathematics and science was not undertaken as a side hustle, nor as some sort of apolitical project to educate people. Adult education was, at the time, considered to be a kind of pillar of the revolutionary movement. The proletariat needed the tools of science and mathematics, not to cash in, but to be effective in that revolutionary movement.

Before we leave Hahn, however, there is a little known fact about him that sheds light on the true nature of the Vienna Circle, and illustrates that it was not so very far apart from the philosophers of the Frankfurt school, and their quasi-Heideggerian critique that positivism was attempting to “disenchant” the world.

Here I draw an a longish story about one Eleonora Zugum, a 11-year-old Romanian Girl, as reported by in Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.

Eleonora became the center of a series of unusual events. Witnesses reported that they saw objects shudder and levitate in the girl’s presence. Soon, Eleonora developed a bad reputation in the village; as the locals would later tell a visiting researcher, “The grandmother could not die because some evil spirits would not permit her, and thus she had sent for the child, in order, by means of witchcraft, to transfer them to her.” Presently Eleonora herself became convinced that she was suffering from demonic possession.

Eleonora’s father and a group of concerned villagers took her to the house of an old priest. No sooner had they arrived than an iron vessel exploded into pieces. Jugs cracked, heavy objects began to shift around, and the windows suddenly shattered. The priest attempted an exorcism, but the phenomena continued. Fearing Eleonora was still cursed, her family deposited her at the monastery and convent of Gorovei (Mănăstirea Gorovei) in Talpa. Even there, she seemed to be at the mercy of invisible powers that smashed and moved things. The monks became frightened and wanted to expel Eleonora, but were prevented from doing so by the prior of the monastery. (Josephson-Storm, 2017)

This was no fairy tale, and it was at this point that Eleonora’s story enters the historical record. Kubi Klein, a reporter for the Jewish German-language newspaper Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, came across Eleonora and published his account of her case on April 18, 1925, under the title “Das verhexte Dorf” (The bewitched village). News about the cursed girl spread through the region. Soon journalists and paranormal investigators were all clamoring to study Eleonora in greater detail. Fearing the impact of this attention, her family committed to her to a mental asylum, where she was kept in isolation.

Fortunately, Eleanora came to the attention of the international parapsychology community, and she was rescued from the asylum and brought to Vienna. There she met the famous mathematician and founding member of the Vienna Circle, Hans Hahn. Hahn was also part of an elite team of paranormal researchers that tested Eleanora’s psychical powers, and he later testified to their authenticity.

What is going on here? It seems that Hahn, like other members of the circle (Carnap, Frank, Feigl, and Hahn’s student, Gödel), was fascinated with things magical and paranormal. Hahn was a founder and member of the executive board of the Austrian Society for Psychical Research (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Psychische Forschung, ASPR). He was a ghostbuster! How do we make sense of this?

Hans Hahn. Mathematician, Logical Positivist, Socialist, and precursor to Peter Venkman?

Were the positivists not the enemies of all things metaphysical? The answer is layered. One take is that they were trying to disenchant these phenomena, but that isn’t so clear. They took these phenomena to be facts that had to be taken seriously, and if we had to adjust science to account for them, well, then science would have to be updated.

Would the positivist really revise the laws of nature to accommodate this type of phenomenon? My friends, even Feigl thought so!

If it were fully established that the phenomena of extrasensory perception, i.e., clairvoyance and telepathy, and perhaps even precognition and psychokinesis, do not result from experimental or statistical errors . . . then our conception of the basic laws of nature may well have to be revised at least in some essential aspects. (Feigl, 1981: p. 314)

While these sorts of phenomena might find themselves in the “Metaphysics” section of your local bookstore, that isn’t what the positivists meant when they called the target of their critique, “metaphysics.” The positivists were opposed to the metaphysics of the intellectual class—Idealism, organized religion, etc.—but there is another notion of metaphysical, the kind you see in bookstores, that has to do with magic and the esoteric. The positivists didn’t necessarily have a problem with that. To the contrary, as Josephson-Storm claims, they saw their project as continuous with that kind of bookstore “metaphysics.” They were the new magicians, and the thought was that they were reconnecting with the natural esoteric beliefs of ordinary folk – rejecting the abstract metaphysical notions that carried intellectual water for the bourgeoisie, German politicians, and the Church. Here is how Josephson-Storm puts it in The Myth of Disenchantment:

For Neurath, instead of science as the culmination of disenchanting Protestant thought, modernity is the return of sorcery. In effect, magic must reappear in order to challenge theology and empty metaphysics. Occult revivals and scientific revolutions would seem to come together. In sum, Neurath was positioning positivism and its unified science as a return, and in that sense as a completion or fulfillment of primitive magic. As he put it elsewhere: “Unified science is the substitute for magic which also once encompassed the whole of life.” (Josephson-Storm, 2017)

That idea is not just in Neurath. It is in the Circle’s Manifesto itself. Consider this passage from the Manifesto:

The representatives of the scientific world-conception resolutely stand on the ground of simple human experience. They confidently approach the task of removing the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia. Or, as some have it: returning, after a metaphysical interlude, to a unified picture of this world free from theology, which had, in a sense, been the basis of magical beliefs (Zauberglauben) in early times.

(There is a relative pronoun antecedent ambiguity in that translation. It is the “unified picture” that was the basis of magical beliefs, not “theology.”) This lines up with the politics of the members of the Circle, because the idea is that the magical realm (which is continuous with their project) is, as it were, at war with the false ideologies of the ruling class.

We are going to come back to this, because, in the end, I am going to make the case that the positivists and the Frankfurt School were not so far apart. Collaboration was, and remains, possible.

There are three more members of the Vienna Circle that I want to discuss, because they are going to return at points during our contra-Schuringa story. One member that will play a key role after immigrating to the United States, is Philipp Frank.

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