Mental Music
The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle
by David Edmonds. Princeton University Press, 2020, $27.95 cloth.
IN 2001, David Edmonds and John Eidinow published the remarkable , subtitled . It was an exemplary exercise in how to write a hugely entertaining book about a chapter in the history of philosophy. They analyzed the personal and philosophical backgrounds of two Viennese philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, as a way of leading up to a famous confrontation between these two men at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club on the evening of Friday, October 25, 1946. By scrupulously seeking out the accounts of those who attended the meeting, Edmonds and Eidinow explored the many versions of this clash with unmistakable relish. And now, in his new book, , Edmonds addresses not just one evening, but an entire era in the history of philosophy. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of Vienna in the years between 1875 and 1938 if you want to make some sense of what was to follow—that is, the shape of the Second World War and the almost
