ABSTRACT
In light of the recent historiography of the Vienna Circle, the old picture of it as a monolithic block of radical positivists aiming at making the world safe for science can no longer be upheld. In its place we now possess a great number of studies that underline a multidimensional pluralism characterizing the membership and the work of this group. This chapter places the genesis of this pluralism in the cultural setting of the Circle, the Ernst Mach Society, and other cultural and intellectual societies which place the members of the Circle in the context of a Viennese culture of late Enlightenment. It analyzes the impact of these societies on central claims of the “scientific world-conception” of the Vienna Circle.
