On the Formation of Logical Empiricism

Abstract

The paper aims at giving a reconstruction of the role played by both French conventionalism and Russell's and Wittgenstein's ideas in the formation of logical empiricism. For this purpose the paper reanalyzes the early 1920s disagreement between Schlick and Reichenbach on the Kantian and neo-Kantian theory of the synthetic a priori and connects this question to the problem (neglected until now) of the so-called "immanence's philosophies". All this is linked up with the relationship between Austrian and German-Kantian components in the origin of neoempiricism and the debate on the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy.