Edgar Zilsel

Edgar Zilsel ( born August 11, 1891 in Vienna, † March 11, 1944 in Oakland, California ) was an Austrian philosopher and sociologist.

Edgar Zilsel had to give as the representatives of Marxist views on political grounds on a university career. He became active in public education and taught from 1934 as a middle school teacher of Mathematics and Physics in Vienna.

As a philosopher, he combined Marxist views with the positivist direction of the Vienna Circle, to whom he was close. He was concerned with the social conditions of the development of modern science and with the connection of the social and natural sciences. After the "Anschluss " of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, he emigrated to the United States. But here he found little connection and got into personal isolation. After private and political disappointments he committed suicide in 1944. His ashes were buried at the Central Cemetery in Vienna.

Work

In his well-known as Zilsels thesis theory he tried to explain the origin of modern science. Zilsel about this as several papers that have been published in 1976 by ​​Wolfgang Krohn in the anthology The social origins of modern science.

Works

• The genius of religion. A critical essay on the modern ideal of personality with a historical justification, Edited and introduced by John Dvorak, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990
• The social origins of modern science, Edited by Wolfgang Krohn, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976
• The application problem. Leipzig: Barth, 1916
• The emergence of the concept of genius. A contribution to the intellectual history of ancient and early capitalism. Tübingen: Mohr, 1926
• Problems of empiricism ( 1941). International encyclopedia of unified science, 2 ( 8), The University of Chicago Press
• Physics and the Problem of historico - sociological laws ( 1941). Philosophy of Science, 8, pp. 567-579