Logical Empiricism

Logical empiricism was a movement rather than a set of doctrines. It flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in the Vienna Circle around Moritz Schlick and in the Berlin Society for Empirical Philosophy, and in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, after a mass emigration of its members from central Europe in the late 1930s. Its members disagreed sharply, and there is probably no position that all of them shared.

What held them together was a concern for scientific method and for the part science could play in reshaping society. They wanted a place for logic and mathematics within that method, and a philosophy that would itself be part of the scientific enterprise, which set them against what they called metaphysics.