Edmonds repeatedly discusses the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the Vienna Circle in philosophy and Austro-Marxism in politics. You might call it ... some sort of waltz. But let us begin with Mach. Ernst Mach was a scientist and philosopher who flourished circa 1900. As a philosopher, he believed that sense perception is the paradigm of all knowledge and that scientific laws, mathematics, and the postulation of unseen entities like magnetic fields, are all simply ways of describing and predicting sense perception. This notion, which came to be called "empirio-criticism," would in time have a great influence on the Vienna Circle. Aside from geography and chronology, Austro-Marxism would seem unrelated to empirio-criticism. The former was an ideology closely associated with Bruno Bauer, the head of Austria's Social Democratic Workers' Party from 1918 to 1934. In '34, as fascists tightened their control in Austria (though at this time they were fasc...
Posts
Who makes the coffee? That was for decades, I think, a pressing problem in petty office politics. Somebody was supposed to make the coffee, although that was seldom in anyone's actual job description. So it was "settled" by informal higgle-haggle. This recent comic parodies that situation. I bring it up only because this comic made me think of K-cups. I've not been in and out of offices in recent years, I've been working from home. But I have to wonder ... have they wrought a revolution?