Philipp Frank and the German Physical Society

Abstract

After the death of Otto Neurath in 1945, Philipp Frank appeared to be the most talented organizer of the Vienna Circle in exile. From his new position at Harvard he organized many of the Unity of Science meetings and served from 1947 on as president of the Institute for the Unity of Science. It is well known that in 1929 he had organized the famous first meeting on Erkenntnislehre der exakten Wissenschaften (Epistemology of the Exact Sciences) in Prague, at which the Vienna Circle went public. Frank later wrote on this:

We wanted to reach a large audience. The ordinary regular philosophy meetings followed the traditional lines and would hardly have given us enough scope. By a happy coincidence I was just in 1929 arranging a meeting of the physicists and mathematicians from the German-speaking regions in Central...The German Physical Society, which was the official sponsor of this meeting, did not particularly like the idea of combining this serious meeting with such a foolish thing as philosophy. However, I was the chairman of the local committee in Prague and they could not refuse my serious...

Some scientists wanted to minimize our program and predicted that they would have no audience from the ranks of exact scientists. As a matter of fact, our addresses had a larger audience than papers on special scientific problems. I had prepared an elaborate paper that was intended to give the scientists a kind of preview of our ideas and to prove that the new line in philosophy is the necessary result of the new trends in physics, particularly the theory of relativity and the quantum...

Some friends cautioned me not to speak too bluntly. The audience, which consisted mostly of German scientists, knew litte about...My wife said to me after the lecture: “It was weird to...Everything seemed to vanish without a trace.”

There is no doubt that quite a few people in the audience were shocked by my blunt statements that modem science is incompatible with the traditional systems of philosophy. Probably, most of the scientists had not been accustomed to thinking of philosophy and science as a coherent system of thought...

After the meeting, however, our committee received a great many letters from scientists who expressed their great satisfaction that an attempt has been made toward a coherent world conception without contradictions between science and philosophy. ([7], p.39–41)