ABSTRACT
The admiration the logical empiricists had for Mach, as well as their affinity with his radical empiricism, his rejection of metaphysics, and his conception of the unity of the object domains of the natural and the social sciences is a well-known phenomenon. But this chapter examines a more thorough engagement of some of the logical empiricists, namely Frank, Neurath, and von Mises, with Mach’s thought, especially with his historical-critical method. It analyzes how Mach’s use of this method in the criticism of Newton’s mechanics was used especially by Frank in his “dialectical” understanding of the history of science, as well as by Neurath in his understanding of economics and economic history.
