Schlick, (Friedrich Albert) Moritz (1882–1936)

German philosopher, physicist, and founder of the Vienna Circle. Under the influence of the early Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical positivism of the German-born US philosopher and logician Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Schlick concluded that all philosophical problems arise from the inadequacy of language. The task of philosophy is to clarify the question in dispute. If the question cannot be ascertained in principle by scientific methods, then the question is meaningless. He based meaning on the possibility of immediate sense-experience. The inaccessibility of this private experience of meaning led Wittgenstein to his ‘use’ theory of meaning.

Schlick, born in Berlin, became professor of the philosophy of the inductive sciences in Vienna, Austria, 1922. He was assassinated 1936 by a demented student, an event that hastened the break-up of the Vienna Circle. His publications include Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre/General Theory of Knowledge 1918.