Background
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was born on December 10, 1882, in Vienna. He was the son of Wilhelm Neurath, a Hungarian Jewish political economist and social reformer, and Gertrud Kaempffert.
Otto Neurath studied at the University of Vienna. Otto Neurath studied at the University of Berlin. In 1917, Neurath completed his habilitation thesis Die Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft (War Economics and Their Importance for th
Otto Neurath studied at the University of Vienna.
1919
Austria
Photo of Neurath published in 1919.
1934
Austria
Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath with the Vienna Circle. The mid-1930s.
1944
London, United Kingdom
Otto Neurath in front of his Isotype chart in London, 1944.
Otto Neurath studied at the University of Vienna. Otto Neurath studied at the University of Berlin. In 1917, Neurath completed his habilitation thesis Die Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft (War Economics and Their Importance for th
Otto Neurath studied at the University of Vienna.
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Otto Neurath studied at the University of Berlin.
Grabengasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
In 1917, Neurath completed his habilitation thesis Die Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft (War Economics and Their Importance for the Future) at Heidelberg University.
https://www.amazon.com/Serbiens-Erfolge-Balkankriege-Wirtschaftliche-Soziale/dp/0666598088/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?dchild=1&keywords=Serbiens+Erfolge+im+Balkankriege+%3A+eine+wirtschaftliche+und+soziale+Studie&qid=1608631044&sr=8-2-fkmr0
1913
(The philosophical writings of Otto Neurath, and their cen...)
The philosophical writings of Otto Neurath, and their central themes, have been described many times, by Carnap in his autobiographical essay, by Ayer and Morris and Kraft decades ago, by Haller and Hegselmann and Nemeth and others in recent years. How extraordinary Neurath's insights were, even when they perhaps were more to be seen as conjectures, aperfus, philosophical hypotheses, tools to be taken up and used in the practical workshop of life; and how prescient he was. A few examples may be helpful: (1) Neurath's 1912 lecture on the conceptual critique of the idea of a pleasure maximum [ON 50] substantially anticipates the development of aspects of analytical ethics in mid-century. (2) Neurath's 1915 paper on alternative hypotheses, and systems of hypotheses, within the science of physical optics [ON 81] gives a lucid account of the historically-developed clashing theories of light, their un realized further possibilities, and the implied contingencies of theory survival in science, all within his framework that antedates not only the quite similar work of Kuhn so many years later but also of the Vienna Circle too. (3) Neurath's subsequent paper of 1916 investigates the inadequacies of various attempts to classify systems of hypotheses [ON 82, and this volume], and sets forth a pioneering conception of the metatheoretical task of scientific philosophy.
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Papers-1913-1946-Bibliography-Collection/dp/9027714835/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hilosophical+Papers%2C+1913%E2%80%931946+neurath&qid=1608632859&s=books&sr=1-1-spell
1946
(On the last day of his life, Otto Neurath had given help ...)
On the last day of his life, Otto Neurath had given help to a Chinese philosopher who was writing about Schlick. Only an hour before his death he said to me: "Nobody will do such a thing for me." My answer then was: "Never mind, you have Bilston, isn't that better?" There were consultations in new housing schemes, an exhibition, and hopes for a fruitful relationship of longer duration. I did not dream at that time that I would one day work on a book like this. The idea came from Horace M. Kallen, of the New School for Social Research, New York, years later; to encourage me he sent me his selection from William James' writings. Later I met Robert S. Cohen. Carnap had sent him to me with the message: "If you want to find out what my political views were in the twenties and thirties, read Otto Neurath's books and articles of that time; his views were also mine." In this way, Robert Cohen became acquainted with Otto Neurath. Even more: he became interested; and when I asked him, would he help me as an editor of an Otto Neurath volume, he agreed at once. In previous years I had already asked a number of Otto Neurath's friends to write down for me what they especially remembered about him.
https://www.amazon.com/Otto-Neurath-Empiricism-Sociology-Collection/dp/9027702586/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Empiricism+and+Sociology+neurath&qid=1608632979&s=books&sr=1-1
1973
(From 1943 until his death in December 1945, Austrian soci...)
From 1943 until his death in December 1945, Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath worked tirelessly on numerous versions of an innovative visual autobiography entitled From Hieroglyphics to Isotype. Now, sixty-five years later, comes the first publication of his full text, carefully edited from the original manuscripts. This edition highlights the important role visual material played in Neurath's life - from his earliest years to his professional work on the Isotype picture language. This engaging and informal account gives a rich picture of Central-European culture around the turn of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of Neurath's insatiable intelligence, as well as a detailed exposition of the technique of Isotype. From Hieroglyphics to Isotype includes an appendix showing examples from Neurath's extensive collection of visual material.
https://www.amazon.com/Hieroglyphics-Isotype-Visual-Autobiography/dp/0907259448/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=Otto+Neurath&qid=1608633716&s=books&sr=1-4
2010
(The Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath was a seminal figur...)
The Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath was a seminal figure of twentieth-century modernist thought. Member of the Vienna Circle, founder of the Museum of Society and Economy, inventor of the famous Isotype pictorial system, and champion of the Unity of Science movement, Neurath espoused a vision of a "global polis" that put him in contact with the leading intellectuals, architects and artists of his time, from Adolf Loos to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, from Sigfried Giedion to Le Corbusier, from graphic designer Gerd Arntz to architect and urban designer Cornelis van Eesteren.
https://www.amazon.com/Otto-Neurath-Language-Global-Polis/dp/9056627988/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Otto+Neurath&qid=1608633716&s=books&sr=1-1
2011
(At the beginning of the 20th century, an unprecedented vo...)
At the beginning of the 20th century, an unprecedented volume of information began circulating in the mass media, calling for the development of new visualization tactics to organize it all. The abundance of news and information required new forms of representation that would allow readers to glean a quick understanding of complex circumstances at a glance; the infographic was born. Image Factories is dedicated to the pioneering infographics of Austrian physician and illustrator Fritz Kahn (1888–1968) and German philosopher Otto Neurath (1882–1945), who both worked with graphic designers to realize their groundbreaking information visualizations. Presenting historical material and imagery designed between 1920 and 1945 alongside contemporary infographics, with a series of essays by Helena Doudova, Stephanie Jacobs, Patrick Rössler, Bernd Stiegler, Vilém Flusser, and Otto Neurath, Image Factories offers a fascinating account of the early development of the infographic.
https://www.amazon.com/Image-Factories-Infographics-1920-1945-Neurath/dp/3959051794/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Otto+Neurath&qid=1608633716&s=books&sr=1-2
2018
economist philosopher scientist sociologist
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was born on December 10, 1882, in Vienna. He was the son of Wilhelm Neurath, a Hungarian Jewish political economist and social reformer, and Gertrud Kaempffert.
Initially studying in Vienna philosophy, mathematics and physics and then history, philosophy, and economics (he formally enrolled for classes at the University of Vienna only for two semesters in 1902-1903), Otto Neurath followed the social scientist Ferdinand Tönnies's advice to move to Berlin, where he received a doctoral degree in history of economics in 1906. He studied under Eduard Meyer and Gustav Schmoller and he was awarded the degree for two studies of the economic history of antiquity, one on Cicero’s De Officiis and the other with an emphasis on the non-monetary economy of Egypt.
In his biographical précis at the end of his doctoral dissertation on Cicero Neurath mentioned having studied mathematics, natural science and philosophy in Vienna with the following: von Escherich, Haberda, Haffner, Hartl, Jodl, Kohn, Kretschmer, von Lang, Lieben, Mertens, Müch, Müllner, Oberhummer, Penck, Schindler, and von Schroeder; and in Berlin, he studied national economy, history and philosophy with the following: von Bortkiewicz, Breysig, Brunner, Eberstadt, Hintze, Jastrow, Landau, Menzer, Meyer, Paulsen, Schmoller, Simmel, and Wagner. He also thanked his studies of the ideas of the logician Gregor Itelson, Wilhelm Neurath’s colleague and mathematician Oskar Simony, and the social scientist Ferdinand Tönnies. In 1917, Neurath completed his habilitation thesis Die Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft (War Economics and Their Importance for the Future) at Heidelberg University.
Otto Neurath's first publications were in logic, a subject he had formally learned at the University of Vienna from Laurenz Müllner and possibly Friedrich Jodl, and in the history of political economy, on which his father had also written. The papers on logic examined different kinds of identities and the principle of duality stimulated by Schröder; they included one paper co-authored with his friend and second wife, Olga Hahn, sister of the mathematician Hans Hahn. In the history of political economy, topics included the history of money and economic organizations in antiquity, and his publications included textbooks and readers either co-authored or co-edited with his first wife Anna Schapire-Neurath. Not surprisingly, his subsequent theorizing on the social sciences and his contributions to debates in logical empiricism integrated both disciplines. With the mathematician, Hans Hahn and the physicist Philip Frank, around 1910 Neurath formed in Vienna a philosophical discussion group devoted to the philosophical ideas about science of Vienna’s phenomenologist Ernst Mach and the French conventionalists Pierre Duhem, Abel Rey, and Henri Poincaré. A great deal of philosophical and scientific concerns and insight were already in place in Neurath’s thinking and projects. With a grant from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a subsequent study of the Balkan wars before World War I led to his theory of war economy as a natural (non-monetary) economy or economy in kind. The fall of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in May 1919 got Neurath expelled from his junior post teaching economic theory at Heidelberg University, where he had received his Habilitation in 1917.
Neurath established the Austrian Society and Economy Museum, where he developed and applied the 'Vienna method' of picture statistics and the ISOTYPE language (International System of Typographic Picture Education). Like the thought of other Viennese philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Popper, Neurath's philosophy was inextricably linked to pedagogical theory, the critique of language, and, in Popper's case, political thought. In 1928, with members of the Austrian Freethinkers Association and the Vienna City Council and the scientifically-trained members of the informal circle around the current holder of Mach's University Chair, the philosopher Moritz Schlick, Neurath helped found the Verein Ernst Mach, the Ernst Mach Association for the Promotion of Science Education. The publication in 1929 of an intellectual manifesto gave way to the formation of the Vienna Circle, whose narrower goal was the articulation and promotion of a scientific world-conception and logical empiricism.
Subsequently, when in 1934 the Austrian government allied itself with the Nazi government in Germany, Neurath fled to the Netherlands. As a result, his local, Viennese, socialist Enlightenment project turned into an internationalist, intellectual, and social-political project. He created the International Foundation for Visual Education in The Hague, with his assistants from Vienna, and spearheaded the International Unity of Science movement. The latter, inspired by a tradition culminating in the Enlightenment's French Encyclopedists, launched the project of an Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Together with the pictorial languages, the scientific encyclopedia would promote scientific and social cooperation and progress at an international level. After Austria became part of the German Reich in 1938, even though living in the Netherlands, Neurath was considered a German citizen and a 'half-Jewish' and he was not allowed to marry his 'Aryan' assistant Marie Reidemeister - after his second wife, Olga, had died in 1937. During this period, he traveled abroad, including the United States, where logical empiricism had become entangled with the Cold War political and intellectual debates and witch hunts. Carnap and Charles Morris at the University of Chicago acted as his co-editors of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. New York leftist intellectuals hosted him as an intellectual and political ally. And his maternal first cousin Waldermar Kaempffert, influential editor for The New York Times and Popular Science, introduced him as an international reformer and visionary, praising his science-oriented intellectual, social and educational ideas, especially his contribution to the unity of science and visual language. After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Otto Neurath and Marie Reidemeister fled to England, on the small Seaman's Hope. After nine months in an internment camp, they resumed activities related to the Isotype language and the unity of science. He died in Oxford on 22 December 1945.
(The philosophical writings of Otto Neurath, and their cen...)
1946(From 1943 until his death in December 1945, Austrian soci...)
2010(At the beginning of the 20th century, an unprecedented vo...)
2018(On the last day of his life, Otto Neurath had given help ...)
1973(The Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath was a seminal figur...)
2011Otto Neurath was born and baptized Roman Catholic.
In 1919 the short-lived Bavarian socialist government (November 1918 - April 1919) appointed Neurath head of the Central Planning Office. His program for full socialization was inspired by his studies of war economics and based on his theory of natural economy and a holistic requirement to bring different institutions and kinds of knowledge together in order to understand, predict and control the complex phenomena of the social world. From 1921 until 1934 Neurath participated actively in the development of Vienna’s socialist politics, especially in housing and adult education.
The common thread of Neurath's intellectual work was his search for conceptual and ideological unity on a societal and human level. Neurath, a typical leftist, dealt with the development of a centralized economy and preparations for socialization.
In 1919, facing the wreckage of World War I, Neurath began hoping to direct an economy, for the short-lived "Soviet republic" in Bavaria. When that regime collapsed, he moved to Vienna and directed housing policy in the city, aiming to create garden-based housing developments for the displaced through the Settlement and Allotment Garden Association. The city government decided to emphasize high-rise structures instead, so he departed.
Neurath refocused on the project of developing a museum of a new kind, a pedagogical display of social and economic trends, which eventually found a home in the city hall. But its greater impact would be as traveling displays, neighborhood shows for which Neurath designed clever presentation formats.
Neurath's efforts to develop the museum flowed from the conviction that language was irreparably alloyed by ideology, so Neurath proposed a series of symbols and charts to transcend it. He declared that "words divide, images unite" and in Isotype offered pictograms that were later called a "picture Esperanto."
Otto Neurath had a considerably more colorful life than most philosophers. From an early age, he was independent-minded to the point of eccentricity, noisy, red-bearded, and combative. Neurath's influence was largely exercised, by way of personal contact, on his contemporaries. His writings have proved less impressive than his powerful personality.
Otto Neurath married Anna Schapire in 1907. She died giving birth to their son, Paul in 1911. Afterwards, Neurath married the mathematician and philosopher Olga Hahn. Olga died during the bombing of Rotterdam by the Nazi air force. Neurath escaped from Rotterdam to England together with Marie Reidemiester, one of his partners in the "Isotype" initiative. The two were married and established the Isotype Institute in Oxford. After Neurath's sudden death in December, 1945, Marie Neurath continued to be active in the Institute. She also published pamphlets and children's books that used the Isotype system.