Edmonds on the Vienna Circle

David Edmonds' "The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle" is the kind of history that can change one's views of philosophical research programs simply through biography. 

For all its historical significance, the Vienna Circle was financially threadbare and short-lived. When it started in 1923, Austria was experiencing the economic hardships of post-WW1 Europe (German wheelbarrows-of-cash hyperinflation was just before that.) Good philosophers were barely getting by and not eating well. But it was still a convivial and energetic environment for working out a new empiricist approach to philosophy together. My favorite character in the book was Otto Neurath, the big warmhearted social scientist / social organizer / socialist who signed his letters with a cartoon of an elephant drawn to express his mood. 

Politically, they were the left-wing philosophical movement of their time and place, sharing an ideology of cosmopolitan scientific empiricism with people like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. Living in bohemian Red Vienna, many (like Neurath) joined up with lefty movements against the rising fascism of the era. Nazi-aligned obscurantists like Heidegger were their right-wing opponents. This doesn't map on to the analytic-Continental divide as recently understood – Rudolf Carnap's essay attacking Heidegger ends with praise for Nietzsche, whom Carnap admires for his empiricism and for the poetry of Zarathustra. 

Hitler ended everything. In 1936, Moritz Schlick was shot by a former PhD student who told the court that the murder was important for fascist ideological reasons, and thus avoided serious punishment. As Nazi power rose, Jewish members mostly got out alive, thanks to connections with academics outside. But everyone had to scatter, and the Vienna Circle was broken. 

In 13 ill-funded years, the empiricists of Vienna created a lot. But their empiricist project had barely gotten started before the Nazis showed up and everybody had to run. Many philosophical movements that later criticized logical positivism had far more funding and far more time, and many of those have left us with less. 

Their empiricism barely had time to develop. Where might it go if developed further? Verification conditions don't provide a good criterion of meaning, but maybe understanding? Does a phenomenalist metaphysics have more life in it than currently believed? Do the stripped-down epistemology and metaphysics of logical positivism allow for moral realism? I think the answer to the last of these is yes, and I think Carnap and Schlick and Neurath would be excited to find out.

Anwar's Triumph Over Rectal Absurdities in Malaysian Politics

Congratulations to Malaysia and its new Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, at the end of a bizarre and triumphant 25-year journey unlike anything else I've heard of in politics. 

Back in 1998, Anwar was Finance Minister, and had won international recognition for getting Malaysia through the Asian financial crisis. Worried that Anwar might be getting too powerful, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed had him arrested on sodomy charges. The alleged victim testified under oath that the charges were actually false, and a semen-stained mattress that supposedly had Anwar's DNA was retracted from evidence when the chemist proved untrustworthy. Nevertheless, Anwar was sent to prison in 1999 until his conviction was overturned in 2004.

Anwar returned to politics as a forceful critic of Mahathir's successor, Prime Minister Najib Razak. In 2008, Anwar was accused of forcible sodomy by top aide Saiful Bukhari. When people asked burly 24-year-old Saiful how the slender 61-year-old Anwar had physically overcome him, Saiful downgraded his former accusations to "homosexual conduct by persuasion", still a serious crime under Malaysia's Islamic government. It was soon revealed that Saiful had gone to Najib's apartment on June 24, shortly before the alleged sodomy of June 26, two days before he filed the police report and was medically inspected on June 28. 

The case went to trial in 2010, with the contents of Saiful's rectum becoming the central topic of Malaysian politics for over a month. I will spare you the gory details. But if you want to look up articles with headlines like "Saiful’s rectum was EMPTY, doctor tells court" and "Saiful inserted plastic in anus, court told" and consider the expert testimony on how the contents of rectums change over time, the internet is open to you.

Anwar was acquitted. But in 2014, a Court of Appeal overturned the acquittal. Anwar was imprisoned for five years without a new trial, because this is Malaysia. 

Around that time, Najib stole $700 million from the government's national investment fund. (When people asked why $700 million had suddenly appeared in his bank account, he tried to pass it off as a gift from a Saudi royal.) He was denounced by former Prime Minister Mahathir, whose own corruption hadn't risen to such extreme heights.

Anwar wanted to defeat Najib, and there was one way to do it. He teamed up with Mahathir, who had imprisoned him on false sodomy charges 20 years before. The men agreed on a deal where Mahathir would become Prime Minister first, and make the still-imprisoned Anwar his successor. As the 2018 elections approached, fear arose that Najib wouldn't respect a close election defeat, and violence would result. But Anwar's reformists and Mahathir's old connections proved unstoppable. Their new Harapan coalition won 121 out of 222 seats, a resounding victory that Najib had no way to overturn. Anwar was freed from prison.

In 2020, Harapan fell apart, and Malay ethnic nationalist leader Muhyiddin Yassin became Prime Minister. Anwar became Leader of the Opposition, in part because Mahathir was 95 years old. On November 20 of this year, new elections resulted in a hung parliament, with Anwar's regenerated Harapan the biggest party at 82 seats. On November 24, Mahathir had lost his seat in Parliament, Najib was serving his corruption sentence at Kajang Prison, and Anwar became the Prime Minister of Malaysia.