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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Zilsel
https://zilsel.hypotheses.org/a-propos
"When Zilsel continued his personal teaching in Vienna after the murder of Schlick, the little 'Zilsel Circle' bravely met until the early months of 1938. Kurt Gtidel gave probably his last lecture to an audience in Vienna at the Zilsel Circle." (p.X)
-Robert S. Cohen, préface à Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2003, 267 pages.
"Edgar Zilsel was born in Vienna on August 11, 1891 to the lawyer Jacob Zilsel and his wife Ina Kollmer. He had two older sisters, Wallie and Irma. From 1902 to 1910 Zilsel attended the high school Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium - now the Bundesgymnasium Stubenbastei. Zilsel then went directly to the University of Vienna to study mathematics, physics, and philosophy. His student years were interrupted by his military service, from August 1, 1914 to December 15 of the same year. He attained his Ph.D. with the dissertation A Philosophical Investigation of the Law of Large Numbers and related Laws (1915). He published an extended version of this dissertation two years later under the title The Application Problem. A Philosophical Investigation of the Law of Large Numbers and its Induction. In September 1915 he took up a job as an insurance mathematician at an insurance company, but left after a year to try to obtain the necessary qualifications to become a secondary school teacher. Despite not being fully qualified, he took up the post of teacher on February 16, 1917. His final teacher's exam was taken on November 18, 1918 in mathematics, physics, and natural history (Naturlehre). Zilsel published his second book in the same year: The Religion of Genius. A Critical Study of the Modern Ideal of Personality. This book polemically addressed the role of the cult of genius in modem society in the form of an investigation into its social and historical roots.
Zilsel married the schoolteacher Dr. Ella Breuer on February 19, 1919 after he had established himself as a teacher at a high school in Vienna. Ella Breuer taught English and German at a women's high school. Their only child, Paul, was born on May 6, 1923. Zilsel was allowed paid leave to take up a position at the Verein Volksheim Wien, now the Adult Education Center 'Ottakring', to teach philosophy and physics. The Verein ('association') was comprised of several institutes dedicated to adult education (Volkshochschule), and was sponsored by the City of Vienna and the socialist trade unions. Zilsel was awarded this position by the city education counselor (Stadtschulrat) Hartmann, who was the head of the Viennese Department of Education, "in appreciation of the applicant's particular suitability for this form of education". In addition to his work at the Volksheim, Zilsel also became engaged in 1924 as a teacher trainer (Lehrerbildung) at the Pedagogical Institute of the City of Vienna. His various duties included chairing the physics department, the philosophy department (beginning 1927/28), as well as being in charge of the apparatus of the physics laboratory. He taught a wide range of topics including lectures on Heidegger, Jaspers, Spinoza, as well as 'Space and Time in Philosophy and Physics', 'The Sociological Essays of Max Weber', 'An Introduction to Psycho-analysis', 'World Religion', 'The Spiritual Life of Natural Peoples', and 'Mysticism and Science'.
Zilsel regularly published essays in academic journals, and was an active contributor to the social democratic journal Der Kampf and the newspaper Arbeiterzeitung. In the summer of 1923 he submitted his Habilitationsschrift which was rejected. The rejection of his Habilitationsschrift prevented Zilsel from pursuing a career at the University of Vienna. In 1926 he published his most important book from this period, The Development of the Concept of Genius. A Contribution to the Conceptual History of Antiquity and Early Capitalism, which was based on his Habilitationsschrift. The book was well received." (P.XX-XXI)
"In the wake of the coup d'etat initiated by Dollfuss in 1934, Zilsel was briefly taken into custody and lost his job. He thereafter worked part-time at various schools until he found a full-time teaching job at a high school in Vienna. [...]
It is unclear when the Zilsel family left Vienna for London. In a letter to Otto Neurath, dated January 17, 1939, Zilsel wrote: "We indeed did manage to escape the Nazi jailhouse and have been living safely in England for some time now". Very little is known about his time in England. He left England via Southampton on March 26 to arrive in New York on April 4. [...]
Within a very short time after his arrival in New York Zilsel was able to establish contact with Max Horkheimer, the director of the International Institute of Social Research (nSR) - the emigrated Frankfurt School. Although they did not have the necessary means to support Zilsel, they did actively assist his efforts to find such. These first few months were spent with the time consuming work of writing project proposals and obtaining recommendations. Zilsel was able to make a little money by privately tutoring classical Greek to an emigre he met on the boat.
In June 1939, Zilsel received a Rockefeller Fellowship to work on the origins of early modern science." (p.XXII)
"In another letter to Neurath (NP/Z, May 8, 1939), Zilsel mentions that he received "very good" letters of recommendation from Carnap, Feigl, Gomperz, and Reichenbach." (note 15 p.XXII)
"In September 1939, he presented a paper entitled 'The Social Roots of Science' to the '5th Congress for the Unity of Science' held at Cambridge, Mass." (p.XXIII)
"Zilsel was offered a job at Mills College in Oakland, Califomia. [...] Lynn White, Ir., President at Mills from 1943 to 1958 and a historian with an interest in 'technology and invention in the Middle Ages and Renaissance' , was familiar with Zilsel's recently published historical work, and worked on similar subjects. Mills was at that time a "small and impoverished institution" which could not afford a specialist solely assigned to teach the history of science. White nevertheless indicated to Zilsel that he would be given the opportunity to teach a course on the history of science. The initial offer of a half-time job was, as White puts it, "to teach physics"." (p.XXIV)
"Zilsel was apparently not very happy at Mills College. Due to White's time consuming administrative duties as president of the college, Zilsel hardly ever had a chance to exchange ideas with him. Zilsel's wife gave him serious cause for concern, not only because of her unstable mental condition, but also because she did not want to follow him to California. Nor did he see much of his son Paul, who studied physics at the University of Wisconsin. All in all, Zilsel found Mills College a very lonely place. All of his fellow teachers were married and went home for lunch or dinner, while he had to remain on campus." (pp.XXV)
"Zilsel must later have become deeply depressed, for on the night of Friday, March 11, 1944 he failed to return to his place of residence. Instead, he stayed in his office and wrote three letters, one addressed to Lynn White, Jr., one to his son Paul, and a third note he put on his desk. Having done that, he "fashioned a pillow from excelsior and his jacket, took poison and then reclined on the floor awaiting death - his hands in his pockets"." (pp.XXVI)
"Zilsel stipulates five key characteristics of the scientific spirit, namely, 1. worldly interests, 2. causal interests, 3. reliance upon independent thinking instead of authority and tradition, 4. aiming at quantification, and 5. empiricism. These are compared and contrasted not only with humanism, but with the other stages of historical development as well. [...]
The main factor which in Zilsel's eyes brought forth the age of science from humanism, and which was lacking in the historical developments of all the other cultures of the world, was capitalism. Humanism, like science, is a mundane and rationally oriented activity, but it has a contemptuous opinion of manual labor. Capitalism is the main force behind the changing attitude towards manual work." (pp.XXVIII)
"Zilsel's radical suggestion is that the origin of experimental work is to be found outside academia with the craftsman, artisans, surgeons, instrument makers, surveyors, navigators and all those who earned their living by getting their hands dirty." (p.XXX)
"We interpret chapters IV-VII as being planned to explain the social origins of the other features of the scientific spirit or ethos. Chapter IV picks up the eminent example of mathematics which is not an experimental activity but a formal science. Zilsel's treatment of the quantitative nature of modern science needs to explain where the origins of this feature are to be located and how it was incorporated into the new science." (p.XXXI)
"Alexandre Koyré was one of Zilsel's harshest critics - see for example the first two chapters of Koyré's Metaphysics and Measurement (Yverdon, etc: Gordon & Breach, 1992 [1968)). Central to Koyre's argument is that the new science of Galileo developed without any role of experiments or experience or sense-perception. It was achieved by "pure unadulterated thought" (Metaphysics and Measurement, p. 13), i.e. Koyre claims that theoretical imagination had primacy over experience. This stress on the sole role of reason in the creation of the new science should be seen against the background of Koyre's deep interest in the way astronomy was transformed during the 'scientific revolution' - see for example his The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus -Kepler Borelli (New York: Dover, 1992). But it is now well established - see the varlous contributions to the Koyre special issue of the journal History and Technology of 1987 - that Koyré' s picture is extreme and one-sided. It is an artifact of his limiting himself to astronomy. As Kuhn pointed out in his review of Metaphysics and Measurement ("Alexandre Koyré & the History of Science', Encounter, 1970,34, pp. 67-9), Koyré's neglect of the entire Baconian movement with its emphasis on experiment, instrumentation, utility, and the study of crafts would have been a "disaster" if applied to the development of chemistry, electricity, or magnetism." (note 53 p.XXXII)
"Phenomenology only tries to revive, in Zilsel's eyes, premodern and prescientific modes of investigation. (p.XXXVIII)
"Zilsel first grappled with the role of the concept of law in his book The Application Problem. The main topic of the book is a riddle posed by the socalled law of large numbers. The law states what at first glance seems to be a rather truistic statement of probability theory, namely that "with a large number of repeated throws of a chance game ... the relative frequency almost equals the mathematical probability." Nature, however, could be rather different. She could produce frequencies quite different from the expected result. It is therefore not at all trivial to ask why the law of large numbers is applicable at all. Zilsel construed this problem as being part of a wider one: how can rational mathematical constructions apply to a vague and irrational nature ? This is what Zilsel termed 'the application problem' .
Since it is neither natural law nor mathematical principle, Zilsel found the epistemological and ontological status of the law of large numbers to be in need of explanation. Zilsel ventured a Kantian solution based upon contemporary theories of statistics and induction. Kant's transcendental solution to the Humean problem of relating deductive reasoning and inductive sense experience was to declare the principle of causality a precondition of knowledge. Either we understand the mutual relations of things in terms of causes and effects, or we don't understand anything.
The critical aspect of Zilsel's thinking that developed out of this analysis of the relationship between the rational laws of probability and empirical causal laws of nature led him to accept that there are general philosophical problems which are related to all sciences but not solvable within anyone specific science. In opposition to the proponents of logical positivism within the Vienna Circle - Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Richard von Mises - Zilsel believed that the discussion of such problems was fruitful and should not be denounced as metaphysical "Scheinprobleme". At the same time, however, he never believed in the capacity of philosophy to solve fundamental problems
independent of empirical research and distrusted philosophy as an independent discipline. Zilsel was very outspoken in his desire to unite these fundamental philosophical problems with the contemporary problems presented in empirical research. He particularly despised all attempts by "schoolmasters ... who would separate ... philosophy from the empirical disciplines". This philosophical position is perhaps clearest in the following quote:
the remaining unsolved and fundamental philosophical problems can only be discussed in a fruitful manner if the results and methods already made in the empirical sciences are taken into account ... [and as) Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare [have shown) it is at present only possible to fruitfully discuss philosophical problems in that intimate connection to living science which characterized the classical philosophy of the 17''' century."
Zilsel's subsequent research on the concept of genius arose within the context of this commitment to the "living sciences". He began to direct the 'application problem' toward the statistical analysis of history and culture. How is the 'nature' of society to be perceived if it is subordinate to the law of large numbers ? Is this 'nature' fundamentally different from that of the natural sciences ? Philosophers of culture would strongly emphasize the difference which Zilsel ventured to deny." (p.XXXIX-XL)
"He was always very close to Schlick, with whom he had "worked intensely on the fundamentals of modem physics"." (p.XLI)
"There was a clash between the different strands of traditional philosophy (including German idealism, Catholic philosophy, and neo-romanticism) and a new philosophy based on formal logic, language analysis, and recent developments in physics. Among German-speaking countries the battle lines were perhaps most clearly drawn in Vienna. The battle began in 1895 when a new chair for the philosophy of the exact sciences was established and occupied by the positivist physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. His successors were Ludwig Boltzmann, Adolf Stöhr, and from 1922 on, Moritz Schlick.
Opposed to this development were the representatives of the traditional conservative and Catholic philosophy. Although the established positions of the conservative faction differed in many respects, they had united views on several issues where knowledge politics played a significant role, among them the conviction that philosophy should be regarded as the 'queen of the sciences'. They defended the speculative and synthesizing power of philosophy and were opposed to any attempt to turn philosophy into a rigorous scientific enterprise. They emphasized a sharp division between philosophy and the empirical disciplines, and did not consider the new logic of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead nor the new metamathematics of Hilbert to be a part of philosophy. Politically, there was a clash between the democratic alliance of the new scientific philosophers like Carnap, Reichenbach, Schlick, Neurath and, directly opposed, the conservative, neo-romantic, and anti-socialist faction." (p.XLII)
"The committee agreed upon three distinguished philosophers of high reputation though differing orientation - Ernst Cassirer (Berlin), Adolf Dyroff (Bonn), and Heinrich Scholz (Kiel). They were asked "whether according to your opinion the work can be appreciated as a piece of philosophy, and whether you believe that its ways of thought (which are obviously located in a boundary area of the history of the humanities) provide a sufficient basis for qualifying its author as a teacher in philosophy". (Letter from the Dean, May 10, 1924) Cassirer was clearly impressed and indicated that "in general I received from it the most favourable impression. ( ... ) I learned many new things with respect to the content of the work as well as its method guiding its subject". On the crucial question of whether the study had philosophical merit his answer was an unequivocal yes. He wrote: "For even in the richness of historical details, which are indispensable in such a work, the selection of the material and the manner of weighing and questioning is consistently determined by general topics related to the history of the humanities and the philosophy of culture. I believe therefore, that the work in question - in line with Zilsel's former works, which I highly esteem as valuable contributions to logic and philosophy of science - is to be considered as a fully valid basis for a philosophical habilitation". Heinrich Scholz gave a lukewarm response. Scholz originally was a philosopher of religion who had turned to the new logic and to a rigid style of applying it to traditional philosophical problems. Though he admitted possessing a concept of philosophy radically different from that ofZilsel's, he did not doubt the philosophical value of the MS. Adolf Dyroff, a philosopher of culture who had the chair for 'catholic philosophy' at the University of Bonn supported Zilsel's critics: "The statistics are not without value ... but they need to be more strongly tied to the heart of the subject matter". Dyroff tried to build a golden bridge. "So it sould be deplorable, if the great intellectual power and sophistication of the author would be lost for the university", and suggested that Zilsel should be allowed to revise the MS. With respect to the controversial point as to whether the MS could be rated as a proper piece of philosophical work, these experts represented exactly the variety of opinions already present on the committee." (p.XLIII)
"He did rework the MS - to what extent is unclear- and published it in 1926 as The Development of the Concept of Genius. It became his most influential book and was reviewed by, among others, Benedetto Croce and Georg Lukacs. Zilsel developed in this work the new empirical methods necessary for what he saw as the goal of his empirical historical research: the discovery of historical laws. [...] At the end of the book a 'final result' is formulated: 'Laws on the concept of genius' . The structure of these laws is a thesis-like summary in which all information on spatial and temporal locations is omitted so as to attain the character of a general 'if-then' proposition. The crux of the scientific validity of these laws rested upon their testability through cross-cultural comparisons. They were meant as provisional scientific hypotheses, to be confirmed, rejected, or modified through research. He considered the analysis of 'renaissances' in different cultures and times as a suitable field for testing the laws he had tentatively formulated. It is exactly this point that offended his enemies. Zilsel's method carried a dramatic shift of perspective in its wake: People, professional work, and cultural periods would lose their uniqueness and come to be seen as mere variables in a temporal development. Even if the resulting laws only barely met the minimum theoretical requirements of lawlike statements, they were of paradigmatic significance to Zilsel for establishing a socio-historical science that is fueled by cooperation and applies comparative cross-cultural methods." (pp.XLIII-XLIV)
"Zilsel's attempt to combine philosophical analysis with detailed historical research directed toward the tentative articulation of general laws caused his Habilitation to falter, and, to a certain extent, it also distanced him from the central figures of the Vienna Circle. In a letter to Reichenbach, Zilsel objected to "the content free methodology and logic of science as practiced today". His target was explicitly, though not exclusively, the practice of members of the Vienna Circle to write abstract philosophy. To some extent this criticism is surprising. Zilsel was, after all, part of the Moritz Schlick discussion-circle, and as a member of the Verein Ernst Mach, he was one of the founding members of the Vienna Circle. His observation however that its members were predominantly interested in the methodology of the sciences and not in the study of new fields is not completely unjustified. For Zilsel, the Vienna Circle could be ironically characterized as an empirical school without empirical research. His critical evaluation of the methodology of the Vienna Circle is particularly clear in two book reviews: Max Adler's Textbook of the Materialist Conception of History (1930), is criticized by Zilsel for having presented only "three concrete examples from real history" in the entire book. In a review of Otto Neurath's book Empirical Sociology, Zilsel noted that "the book has no intrinsic interest in the living content of sociology - in any case, a lot less than in the promotion of the basic logical ideas of the Vienna school of philosophy. Thus, in this 'empirical sociology' fertile empiricism withdraws behind logic". Zilsel considered himself an exception, not only due to his question as to whether history is a potential field for studying laws, but also in terms of epistemological discourse." (pp.XLII-XLIV)
"Zilsel realized in his own historical research how difficult the task of linking the social with the natural sciences was. This made him sceptical about the usefulness of formulating a program of unity as compared to generating unity by means of empirical research. The program of the Vienna Circle as it was formulated in 1929 by Neurath, Carnap, and Hahn was vague in regard to the unity of the social and natural sciences. 'Unity' was conceived as something which was to be found through the "search for a formalized neutral system, ... for a universal system of concepts". The all-important question as to what these basic scientific terms represent for the study of cultural and social phenomena and how they fit into such a system is touched upon rather carelessly. The program simply states: ''The object of history and economics are people, things and their arrangement".98 As to Zilsel's focal question concerning the possibility of laws in all realms of knowledge, the manifesto expresses exactly Zilsel's conviction: "Only step by step can the advancing research of empirical science teach us in what degree the world is lawful"." (p.XLVI)
"The only significant difference between the Vienna Circle and Zilsel was that Zilsel did not believe that a program based on logical analysis and language construction could help in uniting the social and natural sciences." (p.XLVII)
"The bond between logical empiricism and the socialist movement gradually established itself after World War I. Common to both were anti-metaphysical attitudes, a non elitist education system, planning of economic progress, and a plebiscitarian democratic order. Several members of the Vienna Circle had socialist ideas or were even active in the socialist movement: Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, the latter in particular, emphasized the "internal bonds" to the scientific worldview and tried "to strive for a reform of the economic and societal relations". Reichenbach, Joergensen, and Frank held similar opinions.
Zilsel became a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party in 19181, and quickly found a role within the Workers Education Movement in Vienna. He dedicated his book The Development of the Concept of Genius to the People's University of Vienna." (p.XLVII)
"Zilsel' s philosophy was first and foremost Marxist. The notion of law features strongly in both Marxism and in the philosophy of science of the Vienna Circle. For Zilsel, Marxism served as a model for a lawgoverned conception of history and presented hypotheses on the derivation of social structures from a few formative principles." (p.XLVIII)
"Zilsel's research program, as seen against this Marxist background, demanded the development of a historical theory which proceeded by means of a recursive integration of empirical laws discovered by historical and comparative research, as well as the construction of hypotheses capable of statistical falsification." (p.XLIX)
"Zilsel claimed a special role for philosophical analysis within the scientific enterprise, because, as he puts it, there exists
a great number of very general statements which are neither tautological nor Scheinsatze and which can nevertheless not be comprehended by thc customary special branches of science because they equally belong to all disciplines ... In accordance with the historically given meaning of the word one is accustomed to call such statements philosophical. It is thus by no means necessary to deny philosophy of any sort of content, or to relegate her to the mere 'activity' of clarifying concepts. There are by all means substantive, general, and binding fundamental and boundary questions in the framework of science which, although they can't be comprehended by anyone science, can be studied in an exact manner. (p.XLIX)
"His project 'on the social origins of modem science' was an attempt to search for the laws that would causally explain how the concept of law came to dominate our understanding of nature and the reasons for its lack of use in the humanities." (pp.L-LI)
"As long as the metaphysical architecture of the mechanistic world view dominated the concept of law, the perspectives for theory development in the humanities on the basis of empirical laws would have been rather ridiculous - one could know in advance that the gulf between the fundamental concepts of mechanics and the theoretical terms of culture, history, and society could not be bridged by any sort of reductionism. Zilsel's opponents thus did have a point in defending themselves against reductionism. Yet Zilsel suggests that since the metaphysics of the mechanistic world view are now obsolete, the traditional arguments against developing the humanities into a law orientated science no longer pertain. Zilsel's recurring argument against the epistemologists of the human sciences is that they proceed on the basis of a false understanding of the natural sciences. They wrongly believe that the natural sciences are still governed by the concept of the mechanical causal law (and insofar rightly resist accepting such an approach in the humanities). Unfortunately, they developed ideologies which rejected the concept of law completely for the social sciences, and declared the heuristic means of empathy and understanding as 'ultimate goals' (p. 194). But a more modern, non-reductionist, and statistical conception of law could well serve as a framework for the social sciences." (p.LII)
"The suicide of Zilsel was to all who were close to him not only a great emotional shock but also an unexpected event: no one had seen it coming." (p.LIII)
"The contemporary controversy concerning the legitimacy of a causal sociological explanation of the development of science has reached new heights in the so-called 'science wars'. Zilsel intended to contribute to the unity of the sciences "by generating it empirically", and by fighting against qualitative heuristics as ultimate goals. The so-called strong program in the sociology of knowledge, which has adopted Zilsel's causal approach,132 has triggered a long lasting debate between a constructivist and a realist interpretation of scientific knowledge. Philosophy and politics are now just as intertwined as they were when Zilsel defended his program early in his career at the University of Vienna. He did not live to put the pieces of his work together, but - as we hope this collection will serve to demonstrate - the vital questions of his intellectual endeavor continue to persevere." (p.LVI)
-Diederick Raven & Wolfgang Krohn, "Edgar Zilsel: His life and work (1891-1944)", Introduction à Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2003, 267 pages.
-Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2003, 267 pages.
https://zilsel.hypotheses.org/a-propos
"When Zilsel continued his personal teaching in Vienna after the murder of Schlick, the little 'Zilsel Circle' bravely met until the early months of 1938. Kurt Gtidel gave probably his last lecture to an audience in Vienna at the Zilsel Circle." (p.X)
-Robert S. Cohen, préface à Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2003, 267 pages.
"Edgar Zilsel was born in Vienna on August 11, 1891 to the lawyer Jacob Zilsel and his wife Ina Kollmer. He had two older sisters, Wallie and Irma. From 1902 to 1910 Zilsel attended the high school Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium - now the Bundesgymnasium Stubenbastei. Zilsel then went directly to the University of Vienna to study mathematics, physics, and philosophy. His student years were interrupted by his military service, from August 1, 1914 to December 15 of the same year. He attained his Ph.D. with the dissertation A Philosophical Investigation of the Law of Large Numbers and related Laws (1915). He published an extended version of this dissertation two years later under the title The Application Problem. A Philosophical Investigation of the Law of Large Numbers and its Induction. In September 1915 he took up a job as an insurance mathematician at an insurance company, but left after a year to try to obtain the necessary qualifications to become a secondary school teacher. Despite not being fully qualified, he took up the post of teacher on February 16, 1917. His final teacher's exam was taken on November 18, 1918 in mathematics, physics, and natural history (Naturlehre). Zilsel published his second book in the same year: The Religion of Genius. A Critical Study of the Modern Ideal of Personality. This book polemically addressed the role of the cult of genius in modem society in the form of an investigation into its social and historical roots.
Zilsel married the schoolteacher Dr. Ella Breuer on February 19, 1919 after he had established himself as a teacher at a high school in Vienna. Ella Breuer taught English and German at a women's high school. Their only child, Paul, was born on May 6, 1923. Zilsel was allowed paid leave to take up a position at the Verein Volksheim Wien, now the Adult Education Center 'Ottakring', to teach philosophy and physics. The Verein ('association') was comprised of several institutes dedicated to adult education (Volkshochschule), and was sponsored by the City of Vienna and the socialist trade unions. Zilsel was awarded this position by the city education counselor (Stadtschulrat) Hartmann, who was the head of the Viennese Department of Education, "in appreciation of the applicant's particular suitability for this form of education". In addition to his work at the Volksheim, Zilsel also became engaged in 1924 as a teacher trainer (Lehrerbildung) at the Pedagogical Institute of the City of Vienna. His various duties included chairing the physics department, the philosophy department (beginning 1927/28), as well as being in charge of the apparatus of the physics laboratory. He taught a wide range of topics including lectures on Heidegger, Jaspers, Spinoza, as well as 'Space and Time in Philosophy and Physics', 'The Sociological Essays of Max Weber', 'An Introduction to Psycho-analysis', 'World Religion', 'The Spiritual Life of Natural Peoples', and 'Mysticism and Science'.
Zilsel regularly published essays in academic journals, and was an active contributor to the social democratic journal Der Kampf and the newspaper Arbeiterzeitung. In the summer of 1923 he submitted his Habilitationsschrift which was rejected. The rejection of his Habilitationsschrift prevented Zilsel from pursuing a career at the University of Vienna. In 1926 he published his most important book from this period, The Development of the Concept of Genius. A Contribution to the Conceptual History of Antiquity and Early Capitalism, which was based on his Habilitationsschrift. The book was well received." (P.XX-XXI)
"In the wake of the coup d'etat initiated by Dollfuss in 1934, Zilsel was briefly taken into custody and lost his job. He thereafter worked part-time at various schools until he found a full-time teaching job at a high school in Vienna. [...]
It is unclear when the Zilsel family left Vienna for London. In a letter to Otto Neurath, dated January 17, 1939, Zilsel wrote: "We indeed did manage to escape the Nazi jailhouse and have been living safely in England for some time now". Very little is known about his time in England. He left England via Southampton on March 26 to arrive in New York on April 4. [...]
Within a very short time after his arrival in New York Zilsel was able to establish contact with Max Horkheimer, the director of the International Institute of Social Research (nSR) - the emigrated Frankfurt School. Although they did not have the necessary means to support Zilsel, they did actively assist his efforts to find such. These first few months were spent with the time consuming work of writing project proposals and obtaining recommendations. Zilsel was able to make a little money by privately tutoring classical Greek to an emigre he met on the boat.
In June 1939, Zilsel received a Rockefeller Fellowship to work on the origins of early modern science." (p.XXII)
"In another letter to Neurath (NP/Z, May 8, 1939), Zilsel mentions that he received "very good" letters of recommendation from Carnap, Feigl, Gomperz, and Reichenbach." (note 15 p.XXII)
"In September 1939, he presented a paper entitled 'The Social Roots of Science' to the '5th Congress for the Unity of Science' held at Cambridge, Mass." (p.XXIII)
"Zilsel was offered a job at Mills College in Oakland, Califomia. [...] Lynn White, Ir., President at Mills from 1943 to 1958 and a historian with an interest in 'technology and invention in the Middle Ages and Renaissance' , was familiar with Zilsel's recently published historical work, and worked on similar subjects. Mills was at that time a "small and impoverished institution" which could not afford a specialist solely assigned to teach the history of science. White nevertheless indicated to Zilsel that he would be given the opportunity to teach a course on the history of science. The initial offer of a half-time job was, as White puts it, "to teach physics"." (p.XXIV)
"Zilsel was apparently not very happy at Mills College. Due to White's time consuming administrative duties as president of the college, Zilsel hardly ever had a chance to exchange ideas with him. Zilsel's wife gave him serious cause for concern, not only because of her unstable mental condition, but also because she did not want to follow him to California. Nor did he see much of his son Paul, who studied physics at the University of Wisconsin. All in all, Zilsel found Mills College a very lonely place. All of his fellow teachers were married and went home for lunch or dinner, while he had to remain on campus." (pp.XXV)
"Zilsel must later have become deeply depressed, for on the night of Friday, March 11, 1944 he failed to return to his place of residence. Instead, he stayed in his office and wrote three letters, one addressed to Lynn White, Jr., one to his son Paul, and a third note he put on his desk. Having done that, he "fashioned a pillow from excelsior and his jacket, took poison and then reclined on the floor awaiting death - his hands in his pockets"." (pp.XXVI)
"Zilsel stipulates five key characteristics of the scientific spirit, namely, 1. worldly interests, 2. causal interests, 3. reliance upon independent thinking instead of authority and tradition, 4. aiming at quantification, and 5. empiricism. These are compared and contrasted not only with humanism, but with the other stages of historical development as well. [...]
The main factor which in Zilsel's eyes brought forth the age of science from humanism, and which was lacking in the historical developments of all the other cultures of the world, was capitalism. Humanism, like science, is a mundane and rationally oriented activity, but it has a contemptuous opinion of manual labor. Capitalism is the main force behind the changing attitude towards manual work." (pp.XXVIII)
"Zilsel's radical suggestion is that the origin of experimental work is to be found outside academia with the craftsman, artisans, surgeons, instrument makers, surveyors, navigators and all those who earned their living by getting their hands dirty." (p.XXX)
"We interpret chapters IV-VII as being planned to explain the social origins of the other features of the scientific spirit or ethos. Chapter IV picks up the eminent example of mathematics which is not an experimental activity but a formal science. Zilsel's treatment of the quantitative nature of modern science needs to explain where the origins of this feature are to be located and how it was incorporated into the new science." (p.XXXI)
"Alexandre Koyré was one of Zilsel's harshest critics - see for example the first two chapters of Koyré's Metaphysics and Measurement (Yverdon, etc: Gordon & Breach, 1992 [1968)). Central to Koyre's argument is that the new science of Galileo developed without any role of experiments or experience or sense-perception. It was achieved by "pure unadulterated thought" (Metaphysics and Measurement, p. 13), i.e. Koyre claims that theoretical imagination had primacy over experience. This stress on the sole role of reason in the creation of the new science should be seen against the background of Koyre's deep interest in the way astronomy was transformed during the 'scientific revolution' - see for example his The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus -Kepler Borelli (New York: Dover, 1992). But it is now well established - see the varlous contributions to the Koyre special issue of the journal History and Technology of 1987 - that Koyré' s picture is extreme and one-sided. It is an artifact of his limiting himself to astronomy. As Kuhn pointed out in his review of Metaphysics and Measurement ("Alexandre Koyré & the History of Science', Encounter, 1970,34, pp. 67-9), Koyré's neglect of the entire Baconian movement with its emphasis on experiment, instrumentation, utility, and the study of crafts would have been a "disaster" if applied to the development of chemistry, electricity, or magnetism." (note 53 p.XXXII)
"Phenomenology only tries to revive, in Zilsel's eyes, premodern and prescientific modes of investigation. (p.XXXVIII)
"Zilsel first grappled with the role of the concept of law in his book The Application Problem. The main topic of the book is a riddle posed by the socalled law of large numbers. The law states what at first glance seems to be a rather truistic statement of probability theory, namely that "with a large number of repeated throws of a chance game ... the relative frequency almost equals the mathematical probability." Nature, however, could be rather different. She could produce frequencies quite different from the expected result. It is therefore not at all trivial to ask why the law of large numbers is applicable at all. Zilsel construed this problem as being part of a wider one: how can rational mathematical constructions apply to a vague and irrational nature ? This is what Zilsel termed 'the application problem' .
Since it is neither natural law nor mathematical principle, Zilsel found the epistemological and ontological status of the law of large numbers to be in need of explanation. Zilsel ventured a Kantian solution based upon contemporary theories of statistics and induction. Kant's transcendental solution to the Humean problem of relating deductive reasoning and inductive sense experience was to declare the principle of causality a precondition of knowledge. Either we understand the mutual relations of things in terms of causes and effects, or we don't understand anything.
The critical aspect of Zilsel's thinking that developed out of this analysis of the relationship between the rational laws of probability and empirical causal laws of nature led him to accept that there are general philosophical problems which are related to all sciences but not solvable within anyone specific science. In opposition to the proponents of logical positivism within the Vienna Circle - Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Richard von Mises - Zilsel believed that the discussion of such problems was fruitful and should not be denounced as metaphysical "Scheinprobleme". At the same time, however, he never believed in the capacity of philosophy to solve fundamental problems
independent of empirical research and distrusted philosophy as an independent discipline. Zilsel was very outspoken in his desire to unite these fundamental philosophical problems with the contemporary problems presented in empirical research. He particularly despised all attempts by "schoolmasters ... who would separate ... philosophy from the empirical disciplines". This philosophical position is perhaps clearest in the following quote:
the remaining unsolved and fundamental philosophical problems can only be discussed in a fruitful manner if the results and methods already made in the empirical sciences are taken into account ... [and as) Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare [have shown) it is at present only possible to fruitfully discuss philosophical problems in that intimate connection to living science which characterized the classical philosophy of the 17''' century."
Zilsel's subsequent research on the concept of genius arose within the context of this commitment to the "living sciences". He began to direct the 'application problem' toward the statistical analysis of history and culture. How is the 'nature' of society to be perceived if it is subordinate to the law of large numbers ? Is this 'nature' fundamentally different from that of the natural sciences ? Philosophers of culture would strongly emphasize the difference which Zilsel ventured to deny." (p.XXXIX-XL)
"He was always very close to Schlick, with whom he had "worked intensely on the fundamentals of modem physics"." (p.XLI)
"There was a clash between the different strands of traditional philosophy (including German idealism, Catholic philosophy, and neo-romanticism) and a new philosophy based on formal logic, language analysis, and recent developments in physics. Among German-speaking countries the battle lines were perhaps most clearly drawn in Vienna. The battle began in 1895 when a new chair for the philosophy of the exact sciences was established and occupied by the positivist physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. His successors were Ludwig Boltzmann, Adolf Stöhr, and from 1922 on, Moritz Schlick.
Opposed to this development were the representatives of the traditional conservative and Catholic philosophy. Although the established positions of the conservative faction differed in many respects, they had united views on several issues where knowledge politics played a significant role, among them the conviction that philosophy should be regarded as the 'queen of the sciences'. They defended the speculative and synthesizing power of philosophy and were opposed to any attempt to turn philosophy into a rigorous scientific enterprise. They emphasized a sharp division between philosophy and the empirical disciplines, and did not consider the new logic of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead nor the new metamathematics of Hilbert to be a part of philosophy. Politically, there was a clash between the democratic alliance of the new scientific philosophers like Carnap, Reichenbach, Schlick, Neurath and, directly opposed, the conservative, neo-romantic, and anti-socialist faction." (p.XLII)
"The committee agreed upon three distinguished philosophers of high reputation though differing orientation - Ernst Cassirer (Berlin), Adolf Dyroff (Bonn), and Heinrich Scholz (Kiel). They were asked "whether according to your opinion the work can be appreciated as a piece of philosophy, and whether you believe that its ways of thought (which are obviously located in a boundary area of the history of the humanities) provide a sufficient basis for qualifying its author as a teacher in philosophy". (Letter from the Dean, May 10, 1924) Cassirer was clearly impressed and indicated that "in general I received from it the most favourable impression. ( ... ) I learned many new things with respect to the content of the work as well as its method guiding its subject". On the crucial question of whether the study had philosophical merit his answer was an unequivocal yes. He wrote: "For even in the richness of historical details, which are indispensable in such a work, the selection of the material and the manner of weighing and questioning is consistently determined by general topics related to the history of the humanities and the philosophy of culture. I believe therefore, that the work in question - in line with Zilsel's former works, which I highly esteem as valuable contributions to logic and philosophy of science - is to be considered as a fully valid basis for a philosophical habilitation". Heinrich Scholz gave a lukewarm response. Scholz originally was a philosopher of religion who had turned to the new logic and to a rigid style of applying it to traditional philosophical problems. Though he admitted possessing a concept of philosophy radically different from that ofZilsel's, he did not doubt the philosophical value of the MS. Adolf Dyroff, a philosopher of culture who had the chair for 'catholic philosophy' at the University of Bonn supported Zilsel's critics: "The statistics are not without value ... but they need to be more strongly tied to the heart of the subject matter". Dyroff tried to build a golden bridge. "So it sould be deplorable, if the great intellectual power and sophistication of the author would be lost for the university", and suggested that Zilsel should be allowed to revise the MS. With respect to the controversial point as to whether the MS could be rated as a proper piece of philosophical work, these experts represented exactly the variety of opinions already present on the committee." (p.XLIII)
"He did rework the MS - to what extent is unclear- and published it in 1926 as The Development of the Concept of Genius. It became his most influential book and was reviewed by, among others, Benedetto Croce and Georg Lukacs. Zilsel developed in this work the new empirical methods necessary for what he saw as the goal of his empirical historical research: the discovery of historical laws. [...] At the end of the book a 'final result' is formulated: 'Laws on the concept of genius' . The structure of these laws is a thesis-like summary in which all information on spatial and temporal locations is omitted so as to attain the character of a general 'if-then' proposition. The crux of the scientific validity of these laws rested upon their testability through cross-cultural comparisons. They were meant as provisional scientific hypotheses, to be confirmed, rejected, or modified through research. He considered the analysis of 'renaissances' in different cultures and times as a suitable field for testing the laws he had tentatively formulated. It is exactly this point that offended his enemies. Zilsel's method carried a dramatic shift of perspective in its wake: People, professional work, and cultural periods would lose their uniqueness and come to be seen as mere variables in a temporal development. Even if the resulting laws only barely met the minimum theoretical requirements of lawlike statements, they were of paradigmatic significance to Zilsel for establishing a socio-historical science that is fueled by cooperation and applies comparative cross-cultural methods." (pp.XLIII-XLIV)
"Zilsel's attempt to combine philosophical analysis with detailed historical research directed toward the tentative articulation of general laws caused his Habilitation to falter, and, to a certain extent, it also distanced him from the central figures of the Vienna Circle. In a letter to Reichenbach, Zilsel objected to "the content free methodology and logic of science as practiced today". His target was explicitly, though not exclusively, the practice of members of the Vienna Circle to write abstract philosophy. To some extent this criticism is surprising. Zilsel was, after all, part of the Moritz Schlick discussion-circle, and as a member of the Verein Ernst Mach, he was one of the founding members of the Vienna Circle. His observation however that its members were predominantly interested in the methodology of the sciences and not in the study of new fields is not completely unjustified. For Zilsel, the Vienna Circle could be ironically characterized as an empirical school without empirical research. His critical evaluation of the methodology of the Vienna Circle is particularly clear in two book reviews: Max Adler's Textbook of the Materialist Conception of History (1930), is criticized by Zilsel for having presented only "three concrete examples from real history" in the entire book. In a review of Otto Neurath's book Empirical Sociology, Zilsel noted that "the book has no intrinsic interest in the living content of sociology - in any case, a lot less than in the promotion of the basic logical ideas of the Vienna school of philosophy. Thus, in this 'empirical sociology' fertile empiricism withdraws behind logic". Zilsel considered himself an exception, not only due to his question as to whether history is a potential field for studying laws, but also in terms of epistemological discourse." (pp.XLII-XLIV)
"Zilsel realized in his own historical research how difficult the task of linking the social with the natural sciences was. This made him sceptical about the usefulness of formulating a program of unity as compared to generating unity by means of empirical research. The program of the Vienna Circle as it was formulated in 1929 by Neurath, Carnap, and Hahn was vague in regard to the unity of the social and natural sciences. 'Unity' was conceived as something which was to be found through the "search for a formalized neutral system, ... for a universal system of concepts". The all-important question as to what these basic scientific terms represent for the study of cultural and social phenomena and how they fit into such a system is touched upon rather carelessly. The program simply states: ''The object of history and economics are people, things and their arrangement".98 As to Zilsel's focal question concerning the possibility of laws in all realms of knowledge, the manifesto expresses exactly Zilsel's conviction: "Only step by step can the advancing research of empirical science teach us in what degree the world is lawful"." (p.XLVI)
"The only significant difference between the Vienna Circle and Zilsel was that Zilsel did not believe that a program based on logical analysis and language construction could help in uniting the social and natural sciences." (p.XLVII)
"The bond between logical empiricism and the socialist movement gradually established itself after World War I. Common to both were anti-metaphysical attitudes, a non elitist education system, planning of economic progress, and a plebiscitarian democratic order. Several members of the Vienna Circle had socialist ideas or were even active in the socialist movement: Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, the latter in particular, emphasized the "internal bonds" to the scientific worldview and tried "to strive for a reform of the economic and societal relations". Reichenbach, Joergensen, and Frank held similar opinions.
Zilsel became a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party in 19181, and quickly found a role within the Workers Education Movement in Vienna. He dedicated his book The Development of the Concept of Genius to the People's University of Vienna." (p.XLVII)
"Zilsel' s philosophy was first and foremost Marxist. The notion of law features strongly in both Marxism and in the philosophy of science of the Vienna Circle. For Zilsel, Marxism served as a model for a lawgoverned conception of history and presented hypotheses on the derivation of social structures from a few formative principles." (p.XLVIII)
"Zilsel's research program, as seen against this Marxist background, demanded the development of a historical theory which proceeded by means of a recursive integration of empirical laws discovered by historical and comparative research, as well as the construction of hypotheses capable of statistical falsification." (p.XLIX)
"Zilsel claimed a special role for philosophical analysis within the scientific enterprise, because, as he puts it, there exists
a great number of very general statements which are neither tautological nor Scheinsatze and which can nevertheless not be comprehended by thc customary special branches of science because they equally belong to all disciplines ... In accordance with the historically given meaning of the word one is accustomed to call such statements philosophical. It is thus by no means necessary to deny philosophy of any sort of content, or to relegate her to the mere 'activity' of clarifying concepts. There are by all means substantive, general, and binding fundamental and boundary questions in the framework of science which, although they can't be comprehended by anyone science, can be studied in an exact manner. (p.XLIX)
"His project 'on the social origins of modem science' was an attempt to search for the laws that would causally explain how the concept of law came to dominate our understanding of nature and the reasons for its lack of use in the humanities." (pp.L-LI)
"As long as the metaphysical architecture of the mechanistic world view dominated the concept of law, the perspectives for theory development in the humanities on the basis of empirical laws would have been rather ridiculous - one could know in advance that the gulf between the fundamental concepts of mechanics and the theoretical terms of culture, history, and society could not be bridged by any sort of reductionism. Zilsel's opponents thus did have a point in defending themselves against reductionism. Yet Zilsel suggests that since the metaphysics of the mechanistic world view are now obsolete, the traditional arguments against developing the humanities into a law orientated science no longer pertain. Zilsel's recurring argument against the epistemologists of the human sciences is that they proceed on the basis of a false understanding of the natural sciences. They wrongly believe that the natural sciences are still governed by the concept of the mechanical causal law (and insofar rightly resist accepting such an approach in the humanities). Unfortunately, they developed ideologies which rejected the concept of law completely for the social sciences, and declared the heuristic means of empathy and understanding as 'ultimate goals' (p. 194). But a more modern, non-reductionist, and statistical conception of law could well serve as a framework for the social sciences." (p.LII)
"The suicide of Zilsel was to all who were close to him not only a great emotional shock but also an unexpected event: no one had seen it coming." (p.LIII)
"The contemporary controversy concerning the legitimacy of a causal sociological explanation of the development of science has reached new heights in the so-called 'science wars'. Zilsel intended to contribute to the unity of the sciences "by generating it empirically", and by fighting against qualitative heuristics as ultimate goals. The so-called strong program in the sociology of knowledge, which has adopted Zilsel's causal approach,132 has triggered a long lasting debate between a constructivist and a realist interpretation of scientific knowledge. Philosophy and politics are now just as intertwined as they were when Zilsel defended his program early in his career at the University of Vienna. He did not live to put the pieces of his work together, but - as we hope this collection will serve to demonstrate - the vital questions of his intellectual endeavor continue to persevere." (p.LVI)
-Diederick Raven & Wolfgang Krohn, "Edgar Zilsel: His life and work (1891-1944)", Introduction à Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2003, 267 pages.
-Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2003, 267 pages.
