ABSTRACT
As an increasing number of people are aware, many famous philosophers came from, studied in, or taught in Vienna during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Mach, Boltzmann, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and the Vienna Circle. Thomas E. Uebel, in his book Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle rediscovered the old quotations from Philipp Frank, and it is largely from his book that renewed interest in the period from Boltzmann’s death in 1906 to Schlick’s arrival in 1922 developed. As a physicist himself, Alois Höfler, head of the Philosophical Society for most of the period from its founding in 1888 to 1922, played a role in bringing Mach to Vienna in 1895 and was Boltzmann’s friend. In the real world, most actual physicists, like Einstein and Planck, as contrasted with the Vienna Circle and later Logical Positivists, had already attributed a role to physics in determining sound epistemology and ontology.
