ABSTRACT

An important and striking coincidence in the views of two of the greatest philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century has gone practically unnoticed. Moritz Schlick, perhaps best known as the founder and centre of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists (c. 1924–36) anticipated Bertrand RusselPs more recent views on the mind–body problem by at least eleven years. In an article published in 1916 (parts of which had been adumbrated already in an article in 1910), 1 Schlick, stimulated by the views of R. Avenarius, and ultimately referring back to an obscure but highly suggestive brief passage in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (the chapter on Paralogisms of Pure Reason; Rational Psychology), had begun the clarification of the difference between psychological and physical contexts. This he elaborated in his magnificent Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918) and explicated even more fully in the 2nd edition (1925) of this truly trail-blazing book. It is likely that Schlick was influenced by the philosophical monism formulated in the second volume of Alois Riehl’s Der Philosophische Kritizismus. 2 Riehl, in my possibly prejudiced opinion, was the most brilliant and clear-headed among the neo-Kantians. Unfortunately he is all but forgotten nowadays.