A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #10–Rose Rand.

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*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, #10

10. Rose Rand

Rose Rand

At least Zilsel got mentioned by Schuringa. Schuringa does not mention Rose (Róża) Rand once, not even in a footnote. I suspect Rand will be remembered as the most revolutionary, and ultimately one of the three most important members of the Vienna Circle (along with Neurath and Carnap).

Rose Rand, was born in what is now Lviv, Ukraine and emigrated to Vienna in high school. At the University of Vienna she studied under Schlick, and ended up writing on the Polish logician Tadeusz Kotarbinski, which is already badass. Like the other Circle members, she participated in the adult education programs in Red Vienna, but also worked as a researcher in a Psychiatric Hospital. In Vienna. In the age of Freud. Think about that.

A theme that I will return to in this review/essay is the role of the scribes of the revolutionary movement. If we think of the project of the Vienna Circle as being revolutionary, and it is hard not to see it as revolutionary in the aftermath of Schlick’s murder, then Rose Rand was the scribe of this revolution. She took detailed minutes of Circle meetings for a period of about three years. Most famously, she took notes during the meeting in which Gödel presented his results about the incompleteness of arithmetic to the Circle. She also preserved an enormous amount of correspondence with members of the Circle and other contemporaries, leaving behind a huge archive of documents— over 1600 of her letters are now kept at the University of Pittsburgh library, along with a treasure trove of unpublished manuscripts and notes in Russian, Polish, German, and English, and her own shorthand. People are just now beginning to sift through what is an intellectual goldmine (Rand, 2026).

Online records are inconsistent, but in either 1938 or 1939, Rand (who was Jewish) escaped Continental Europe with the help of the British philosopher Susan Stebbing (we will discuss Stebbing next). Once in England, however, finding academic work was not easy. Thanks to Stebbing, Rand had some financial support at Cambridge (allowing her to interact with Wittgenstein), but she lost that support in 1943 and had to work as a nurse and as a worker at a metal fabrication factory while also teaching night classes on German and psychology at area technical colleges. In 1954, she moved to the United States, and did not fare much better, cobbling together occasional adjunct teaching positions and jobs translating papers by Polish logicians. Her financial position was precarious until the very end.

When I say that I think she was the most revolutionary of the members of the Vienna Circle, what I mean is that she was able to meld their two projects in a way that the others had not, perhaps with the exception of Zilsel. My thought is that running through the history of the Vienna Circle, there were two distinct projects—one having to do with social engagement and the other having to do with logic and mathematics. Those projects were unified in that the scientific project could free us from metaphysics, which in turn could free us from right-wing bourgeois ideology. Zilsel more directly unified these projects by applying formal ideas from statistical mechanics to sociology. Rand also pursued a more direct integration; she pursued the idea of extending formal logic from a logic that could describe or represent states of affairs (the task that it served in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, for example), to a logic for demand, serving as a precursor to what is now called deontic logic (a logic of obligation).

In 1939, more than a decade before deontic logic emerged within 20^th-century formal logic (usually credited to von Wright), Rand published a paper titled “Logik der Forderungssätze” (Rand, 1939). Basically, she was extending the domain of formal logic to include demands (for example, legal demands), and she talked about the logic that they obeyed—what could be contradictory demands, what could be the negation of a demand (not the absence of a demand but a demand to not do something), how demands can be iterated, etc. The paper was revolutionary in two ways. First, it was an early attempt to develop a logic for non-representational phenomena. Second, it is the idea that logic is not static, and it can be extended to the domains of the practical and legal. One way to put it is that it was a logic deeply aligned with the Vienna Circle’s manifesto.

Rand’s paper was republished in English in Synthese in 1962, so it was on someone’s radar, but I do not believe people fully understood how revolutionary Rand’s work was. Or perhaps some of them did; in 1939 the same year her paper appeared in German, the Yale logician Fredric Fitch reviewed her paper in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Two years later, Fitch acquired a new student, named Ruth Barcan. Logicians have precursors, too.

It is somewhat criminal that universities in England and the United States would not hire Rand when she left Vienna. The reasons they didn’t are pretty obvious: a single Jewish woman who was reportedly “socially awkward” would have had a tough go getting hired in the 1940s, and it might also be the case that her ideas were just too radical as well. You have to imagine what the ethicists would have thought of her work, extending logic to the holy realm of the ethical. Or imagine what the logicians would have thought of her gumming up their sacred Aristotelian logic, or their propositional logic, with talk about obligations and demands. Even in the 1980s, when I was a graduate student at Columbia, I remember Ruth Barcan Marcus delivering a talk on deontological logic. I was thinking, some 40 years after Rand had published her pioneering work, what the hell was that? It was still bleeding-edge stuff 40 years later.

So, like I said, it is criminal that Rand was not hired by an anglophone university, and that was a clear injustice for her, but it also makes me wonder about the responsibility of universities to their students. Each and every university in England and the United States had the opportunity to hire a person who was not merely doing cutting-edge work, but who had sat there at the table with the Vienna Circle, taking copious notes on work that laid the foundations for 20^th-century philosophy, logic, mathematics, and science. She could have told the students about meeting Einstein, or what it was like being a researcher in a Viennese psychiatric hospital in the age of Freud, or what it was like to be in Vienna during the rise of fascism and the murder of Schlick, or what it was like to flee from Nazis, or to take a class from Wittgenstein, or what it was like to be sitting at the table, taking notes, the day that Gödel informed the world that arithmetic was fucking incomplete. Not one university cared enough about their students to hire her and thereby give them first-person access to the deep intellectual history of the 20^th Century. Like I said: fucking criminal.

Oh and also: too bad Schuringa didn’t have space to mention her once in his 336 page work on the history of Analytic philosophy.

When Schuringa turns his gaze to England and the early days of British Analytic philosophy, he persists in his strategy of downplaying the political activism and social engagement of Analytic philosophers. And we can begin with his treatment of Susan Stebbing, the woman who helped Rose Rand emigrate to England.

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