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Article: Positivism, Logical
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
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Positivism, Logical
The term
logical positivism
is particularly associated with the so-called Vienna Circle, a group of leading philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists that met in Vienna, Austria, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with German philosopher Moritz Schlick (1882
–
1936) as chairman. They put forward what they regarded as a "scientific world-conception," which was both anticlerical and opposed to metaphysics. It was, they believed, characterized by two main features. The first was a general empiricism, and the second a devotion to a certain rigorous way of thinking that they called
logical analysis.
This relied particularly on the techniques of modern formal ...