Background
Waismann, Friedrich was born in 1896 in Vienna.
Waismann, Friedrich was born in 1896 in Vienna.
University of Vienna. Inds: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
1937-1938, Lecturer, University of Cambridge. 1946 8, Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science and Mathematics. University of Oxford.
1948-1950, Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Mathematics. University of Oxford. 1950-1955, Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics, University of Oxford: 1955-1959, Reader in the Philosophy of Science, University of Oxford.
Main publications:
(1936) Einführung in das mathematisches Denken, Vienna: Springer (English translation, Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, New York: Ungar, 1951).
(1945) ‘Verifiability’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume.
(1949-1952) ‘Analytic-synthetic’, Analysis 10.2, 11.2, 11.3, 11.6, 13.1, 13.4.
(1965) The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, ed.
Rom Harre, London: Macmillan.
(1968) How l See Philosophy, ed. Rom Harre, London: Macmillan.
(1977) Philosophical Papers, ed. Brian McGuinness, Dordrecht: Reidel.
(1979) Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. Brian McGuinness, trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness, Oxford: Blackwell.
(1982) Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. Wolfgang Grassl, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
As a member of the Vienna Circle Waismann worked closely with Wittgenstein on a book expounding the latter’s ideas (a version of which was subsequently published as The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, 1965). In 1935, Wittgenstein broke off the collaboration, but Waismann’s subsequent work continued to be heavily influenced by his views.
Waismann is largely remembered as the expositor of Wittgenstein's views. Some of his own developments of these views, however, were important. Perhaps the most influential was that of the ‘open texture' of language: although there may be perfectly good rules for the use of our concepts, these cover only the usual circumstances and there are imaginable circumstances in which we should not know whether they applied.
This phenomenon, which Waismann considered a virtue of language rather than a vice, had important implications. It led to the thesis that even empirical statements could not be completely verifiable by observation, and supported his view that there could be no rigid demarcation between analytic and synthetic statements.