Moritz Schlick.(Vienna Circle)

Logical positivism is also severally known as logical empiricism, scientific philosophy and neo-positivism.

This is a philosophy that combines Empiricism
(the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge) with a version of Rationalism.

It incorporates mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions and may be considered as Analytic philosophy.

Logical positivism began from discussions of a group known as the First Vienna Circle, which gathered during the earliest years of the 20th century in Vienna.

After World War I, Schlick’s Vienna Circle along with Hans Reichenbach’s Berlin circle propagated the new doctrines more widely during the 1920s and early 1930s.

A 1929 pamphlet summarized the doctrines of the Vienna Circle at that time. The doctrines opposed Metaphysics – not because it was wrong but as having no meaning!

All knowledge should be codified by a single standard language of science. Ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language.

During the early 1930s, the Vienna Circle dispersed, mainly because of political upheaval and the untimely deaths of Hahn and Schlick. The most prominent proponents of logical positivism emigrated to the United Kingdom and the United States, where they influenced American philosophy considerably.

Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science. During this period, Carnap proposed a replacement for the earlier doctrines in his The Logical Syntax of Language.

This change of emphasis and the somewhat different opinions of Reichenbach and others resulted in a consensus that the English name for the shared doctrine, in its American exile from the late 1930s, should be “logical empiricism.”

Contemporary status within philosophy

Most philosophers consider logical positivism to be, “dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes.” By the late 1970s, its ideas were so generally recognized to be seriously defective nearly all of it was false.

It retains an important place in the history as the antecedent of some of the philosophies which continue now!