THE TERM “LOGICAL EMPIRICISM” refers to one of the most prominent philosophical movements of the twentieth century, which became dominant within the Anglo- Saxon world. Its origins can be decisively traced back to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, whose members had various ties to Red Vienna culture and its protagonists. The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophically interested male and female academics, many of Jewish origin, from diverse disciplines. Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Herbert Feigl, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Olga Taussky-Todd, Edgar Zilsel, Viktor Kraft, Karl Menger, Richard von Mises, Gustav Bergmann, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, and several others made up the group's inner circle; the most prominent temporary members were Alfred J. Ayer, Karl Bühler, Josef Frank, Hans Kelsen, Charles W. Morris, Karl Raimund Popper, Alfred Tarski, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Willard Van Orman Quine. The history of the Vienna Circle has been divided into an early phase (1918–1929), during which above all the philosophy of Wittgenstein was central, and a high-profile, late phase (1929–1938), which is characterized by the founding of the Ernst Mach Society, increased conferences, congresses, and publications, and was punctuated by the political caesura of the year 1934. In that year, officials not only destroyed and dismantled Red Vienna but also dissolved the Ernst Mach Society; Otto Neurath escaped political persecution by the Austrofascists by emigrating to Holland, then later fleeing to Great Britain to escape the invading German military. Other members of the Vienna Circle also escaped, many fleeing to England and America.

Although some members of the Vienna Circle were active in Prague and Berlin, there were three conditions that favored Vienna as the birthplace of logical empiricism. First, the school reform of the late nineteenth century institutionally solidified the natural sciences into the curricula of the Austrian school system and contributed to the fact that the generation of the Vienna Circle immersed themselves in mathematics and physics from an early age. Additionally, the university extension movement (Volksbildungsbewegung), which originated in Oxford and Cambridge, also gained ground in Vienna and, in working with the Social Democratic city government, made the natural sciences a focus of its curriculum.