Otto Neurath

Person · Open Library

Born

1882

Died

1945

Works

50

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

1. Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

   · 2020 · cited 15,988x

2. On the Origin of Cancer Cells

   · 1956 · cited 11,447x

3. Development and validation of a geriatric depression screening scale: A preliminary report

   · 1982 · cited 11,182x

4. Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

   · 2018 · cited 10,999x

5. Global Burden of Cardiovascular Diseases and Risk Factors, 1990–2019

   · 2020 · cited 10,253x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

• “We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”
• “If one could only fly over the Earth and show everybody, Chinese gardeners live side by side in old fashion. Next to them a capitalist germ cell which puts its feelers out into the country! See the factory chimney smoking! Ships come and go. And in the North, nomads and tribes of hunters who don’t know anything of a capitalist order even though they sell furs to entrepreneurs. A sharpened eye would be able to grasp this. All of this can be grasped and represented in pictures!”
• “Science as a system of statements is always an object of discussion. Statements are to be compared with statements, and not with 'experience', or with 'the world', or with something else. All that meaningless doubling belongs to more or less subtle metaphysics and as such must be rejected. Every new statement is to be confronted with existing ones, already brought to a state of harmony between themselves. A statement will be considered correct if it can be joined to them.”
• “Finally it should be noted that the picture education, especially the pictorial statistics, are of international importance. Words carry more emotional elements than set pictures, which can be observed by people of different countries, different parties without any protest; Words divide, pictures unite.”
• “All content of science, and also their protocol statements that are used for verification, are selected on the basis of decisions and can be altered in principle.”
• “Quite a few political economists advocate the thesis that a Robinson Crusoe — or what amounts to the same thing, a controlled economy — calculates in terms of profits and losses.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born

Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath , ( 1882-12-10 ) 10 December 1882, Vienna , Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Austria )

Died

22 December 1945 (1945-12-22) (aged 63), Oxford , England

Education

University of Vienna (no degree) , University of Berlin ( Ph.D. , 1906) , Heidelberg University ( Dr. phil. hab. , 1917)

Theses

Zur Anschauung der Antike über Handel, Gewerbe und Landwirtschaft (On the Conceptions in Antiquity of Trade, Commerce and Agriculture) (1906) Die Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft (War Economics and Their Importance for the Future) (1917)

Doctoral advisor

Gustav Schmoller , Eduard Meyer

Era

20th-century philosophy

Region

Western philosophy

School

Analytic philosophy , Logical positivism , Vienna Circle , Epistemic coherentism

Institutions

New Vienna Commercial Academy , Heidelberg University

Main interests

Philosophy of science , sociology , political economy , logic , pedagogy , museology

Notable ideas

Physicalism , Protokollsatz ( protocol statement ), Neurath's boat , Isotype

via Wikipedia infobox