From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man? the story of an
extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22 1936
the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna
when Johann Nelböck a deranged former student of Schlick's shot him dead on the university
steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman while Nelböck himself argued in court that
his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise
and fall of the Vienna Circle-an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick-and of
a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city
darkened by fascism anti-Semitism and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto
Neurath Rudolf Carnap and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other
philosophical titans of the twentieth century Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle
championed the philosophy of logical empiricism which held that only two types of propositions
have cognitive meaning those that can be verified through experience and those that are
analytically true. For a time it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the
outbreak of World War II Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled.
Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat.
The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its
members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe
and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.
