Neurath, Otto(1882–1945)
Otto Neurath, an Austrian sociologist and philosopher, was one of the originators of logical empiricism and an independent Marxist socialist. A man of great vitality, intelligence, and good humor, Neurath was a polymath and an energetic organizer of academic, educational, and economic affairs. His major work was in sociology, economic and social planning, scientific method, and visual education, this last especially by means of an international language of simplified pictures ("isotypes"), but he was also interested in the history of science, political and moral theory, economic history, and statistical theory and was engaged in recurrent efforts to create a new encyclopedism.
Economic and Comparative History
Neurath's first article, published in 1904, was "Geldzins im Altertum" (Commercial interest in antiquity), and in 1909 he published a popular history of the economic systems of classical Greece and Rome, Antike Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1909), which he supplemented by shorter studies of ancient economic thought. His historical interests then turned to physical science. A little-known paper of 1915, "Prinzipielles zur Geschichte der Optik," compared the ideas on optics of Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Christian Huygens, Thomas Young, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, Jean-Baptiste Biot, and Étienne-Louis Malus with respect to their conceptual images of periodicity, polarization interference, and Huygens's principle of continuity of centers of force.
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