ABSTRACT
The favored term for some of Vienna Circle and for their compatriots in Berlin was, thus, "wissenschaftliche Philosophie", scientific philosophy. The anti-metaphysical projects of pre-reformation analytic philosophy that Williamson deploys to frame his historical puzzle are logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. This chapter provides only few brief reminders of this central theme in logical positivist work. It turns to is British Academy lecture by Susan Stebbing, "Logical Positivism and Analysis". The chapter wants to say two general things about it, one from the point of view of the history of logical positivism and one from the point of view of history of analytic philosophy. Given the facts of the explosive rise of rather broad tent "analytic philosophy" at mid-century in the USA, it would appear that Moorean analytic philosophy won and logical positivism lost. Carnap's vision of scientific philosophy is, in its fundamental gesture, a proposal for getting philosophers to engage in research tasks modeled on those of science.
