In the second half of the nineteenth century Kant was regarded with enormous respect by the most reasonable part of the German philosophical community. This attitude was inspired partly by the intrinsic value of Kant's work, but partly also by the dramatic contrast between his sober, reasonable approach and the romantic flights of those who followed him on the German scene.

Early in the twentieth century, that periodic German revolt against reasonableness started once again; and once again Kant compared favorably with the Schelers and the Heideggers that began to capture the imagination of the philosophical masses. Little wonder that those more inclined to take things calmly organized a zurück zu Kant movement of their own, emphasizing the scientific aspect of Kant's work, much in the fashion of Helmholtz, Zeller, Riehl, and also the Marburg school. All of the leaders of Viennese positivism began their philosophical path as neo-Kantians of this kind. Schlick was the first among them.

With Schlick, we are back in the world of Kantian questions and semi-Kantian answers, so different from that of the semantic tradition. The little he knew of that tradition before Vienna was primarily its hypostatic version in the writings of Brentano's students and, to a lesser extent, in Russell's. Like so many others before and after him, Schlick concluded that a nonpsychologistic theory of meaning was incompatible with empiricism.