Analytic philosophy
Logical positivism

During the late 1920s to 1940s, a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, and another one known as the Berlin Circle, developed Russell and Wittgenstein's philosophy into a doctrine known as " logical positivism " (or logical empiricism). The Vienna Circle was led by Moritz Schlick and included Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. The Berlin Circle was led by Hans Reichenbach and included Carl Hempel and mathematician David Hilbert.

Logical positivists used formal logical methods to develop an empiricist account of knowledge. They adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or synthetic. The truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgments; anything else was nonsense.

This led the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics, as meaningless. It had the additional effect of making (ethical and aesthetic) value judgments (as well as religious statements and beliefs) meaningless.

Logical positivists therefore typically considered philosophy as having a minimal function. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own.

Several logical positivists were Jewish, such as Neurath, Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Friedrich Waissmann, and Reichenbach. Others, like Carnap, were gentiles but socialists or pacifists. With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1933, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled to Britain and the United States, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in anglophone countries.

In 1936, Schlick was murdered in Vienna by his former student Hans Nelböck. The same year, A. J. Ayer 's work Language Truth and Logic introduced the English speaking world to logical positivism.

The logical positivists saw their rejection of metaphysics in some ways as a recapitulation of a quote by David Hume:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
punctuation:no_comma