Otto Neurath 1882 – 1945

Otto Neurath was an Austrian sociologist, economist, and philosopher of science and one of the leading members of the Vienna Circle. A committed socialist and engineer of public information, he developed the Isotype system of pictorial statistics to make scientific knowledge accessible to a mass public. His philosophical writings rejected the foundationalist ambitions of much logical empiricism in favor of a coherentist picture famously captured in his image of sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea. After fleeing the Anschluss he lived in the Netherlands and England.

Otto Neurath was born in 1882 in Vienna, the son of the political economist Wilhelm Neurath. He took degrees in economics, mathematics, and philosophy at Berlin and Vienna, served as an economist in the wartime administration of the Habsburg empire, and in 1919 was briefly head of the central economic planning office of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, after whose collapse he was tried, then released and returned to Vienna.

He was the principal organizer of the Vienna Circle and the chief editor of its Manifesto The Scientific Conception of the World (1929). With Marie Reidemeister he developed the Isotype pictorial system for communicating social and economic statistics, and from 1925 directed the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna. The fascist takeover of Austria in 1934 forced him to The Hague, and the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 to England, where he settled at Oxford. His writings include Empirical Sociology, Foundations of the Social Sciences, and the long series of essays on physicalism, protocol sentences, and unified science.

Neurath argued for a thoroughly physicalist unified science without epistemological foundations — knowledge is to be repaired, in his famous image, like a ship at sea that cannot be drydocked — and for the public role of scientific communication in democratic life. He died suddenly at Oxford in December 1945, soon after his third marriage.