First published in Germany in 1918, this acutely reasoned treatise attacks many of philosophy's contemporary sacred cows, including the concept of metaphysics and Kant's arguments for synthetic a priori knowledge. The book expounds most of the doctrines that would later be identified with the "classical period" of the Vienna Circle. Unlike many of his peers, Schlick displays a detailed and sensitive knowledge of the traditions he criticizes, displayed here in the chief work of this pioneering Viennese philosopher.

"Many of the early positivists, such as Carnap and Reichenbach, assumed that the basic tenets of positivism made it unsuitable for many of the classical topics of philosophical discourse, especially in ethics. Moritz Schlick, however, the renowned leader of the "Vienna Circle", disputed their assumption in this major work on ethics. In it he demonstrated that positivism actually is well equipped to deal with normative issues and that ethics can have a cognitive content. This was a successful refutation of many of the critics of logical positivism and even was startling to many of the positivists themselves. The book caused considerable excitement when it was first published thirty years ago, and now had come to be regarded as a classic counter to many over-subtle and anti-rational views of ethics held today. Schlick found he was able to apply the positivist approach to a surprisingly large number of the problems of traditional ethics—motivation, freedom and responsibility, applied his scientific method to such diverse problems as the prejudice against pleasure, the pleasure of pain, and the act of martyrdom. His book accurately reviews and criticizes the major approaches to ethics in a completely clear, straightforward manner, finding background for its discourse from such interesting sources as Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Beethoven, and Anatole France. Throughout the entire book Schlick never strays from his strictly scientific approach to the problems of moral conduct—his aim is to gather, clarify, and analyze, not to admonish or exhort."-Publisher.

[1977] Hermann von Helmholtz in the History of Scientific Method In 1921, the centenary of Helmholtz' birth, Paul Hertz, a physicist, and Moritz Schlick, a philosopher, published a selection of his papers and lectures on the philosophical foundations of the sciences, under the title Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie. Combining qualities of respect and criticism that Helmholtz would have demanded, Hertz and Schlick scrupulously annotated the texts. Their edition of Helmholtz was of historical influence, comparable to the influence among contemporary mathematicians and philosophers of Hermann Weyl's annotated edition in 1919 of Riemann's great dissertation of 1854 on the foundations of geometry. For several reasons, we are pleased to be able to bring this Schlick/ Hertz edition to the English-reading world: first, and primary, to honor the memory of Hermann von Helmholtz; second, as writings of historical value, to deepen the understanding of mathematics and the natural sciences, as well as of psychology and philosophy, in the 19th centur- for Helmholtz must be comprehended within at least that wide a range; third, with Schlick, to understand the developing empiricist philosophy of science in the early 20th century; and fourth, to bring the contributions of Schlick, Hertz, and Helmholtz to methodological debate in our own time, a half century later, long after the rise and consolidation of logical empiricism, the explosion of physics since Planck and Einstein, and the development of psychology since Freud and Pavlov.