Otto Neurath: biography of this philosopher

Otto Neurath was an important and versatile Marxist philosopher. Born on December 10, 1882 in Vienna, he was an important philosopher and sociologist who developed several projects throughout his career.

Otto Neurath, not only had knowledge in the area of ​​philosophy and the study of society, but also had studies in economics, mathematics and history.

In this article we will talk about the life and trajectory of this thinker through a biography of Otto Neurath; We will see his studies and fields of application, his life trajectory in Vienna and abroad, his creation of the well-known language ISOTYPE, thought and finally the contributions of it, works in the field of knowledge.

• Related article: "Types of philosophy and main currents of thought"

Otto Neurath Biography

Otto Neurath was a very versatile man. Neurath stood out mainly for being the promoter of the Vienna Method of graphic language, also called the ISOTYPE language.

During his youth he devoted himself to studying economics and social sciences abroad, graduating at the age of 24 in Berlin, Germany.

He was closely linked to the field of the philosophy of language, known as one of the branches of philosophy that studies everything related to language. That is, the study of concepts such as truth, learning, meaning, sense, creation of language, experience, thinking, and finally the use of language, communication and interpretation, always from a point of view linguistic.

Otto Neurath postulated that it was not legitimate to carry out research on the relationships that exist between things, beyond purely linguistic questions.

Trajectory as a thinker

Since he graduated, Otto Neurath He was closely linked to both the University of Berlin and the academic circles of Vienna.

He founded the Institute Mundaneum Den Haag-Stichting voor Beeldpaedagogie, an institute dedicated to pedagogy through the image, which was born in Vienna and with the passage of time it would end up spreading through branches in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Prague, New York and Moscow. At Oxford, he founded a similar institute: the Oxford Institute for Visual Education.

In Vienna, he was director of the Vienna Museum of Society and Economics and was part of the Vienna Circle, which was considered a group that served as the ideological and organizational nucleus of one of the currents that he defended: logical positivism, a theory that emerged during the early twentieth century and that postulated that the only way to achieve knowledge is through those experiences that are based on the perception of the senses.

• You may be interested: "What was the Vienna Circle? History of this philosophical group"

The ISOTYPE language

The ISOTYPE language was a type of visual communication created by Otto Neurath during 1937, accompanied by two graphic artists: Marie Neurath (who would end up being his wife) and Gernt Arnzt. This language was characterized by being able to express exclusively visual all kinds of messages and information.

Otto Neurath's objectives were to transmit information about society and the economy, in a clear, simple way, easy and accessible, designed for a post-war population that at that time had high rates of illiteracy.

A) Yes, He wanted to get any citizen, regardless of his studies, to be able to understand the complexity of the world and its nuances and thus, make them real participants in the issues of the world. Otto Neurath defended the search for a new way to get information, through a simple and easy method of teaching and at the same time learning.

Otto Neurath defined the ISOTYPE language as “a method that contains a visual dictionary and a grammar; a new visual world comparable to that of the word ”. In this way, the communication of important problems related to any area of ​​knowledge was viable, through a symbolic language based on images.

The ISOTYPE language It consisted of a dictionary of symbols with a meaning and a grammar that gives rise to the appropriate rules to assign meanings.

In creating the dictionary, hundreds of synthetic drawings were defined and engraved by the two graphic artists Marie Neurath and Gerd Arntx, which were sufficient to represent in a nominal way all kinds of things belonging to reality> people, spaces, objects, ideas, cultures, etc.

With the creation of this dictionary, Otto Neurath structured a series of ways to combine symbols, endowing them with functional values ​​for the syntactic construction of language. Let's give an example to make it better understood: a symbol of a jacket and another of a store are used to make a new one that means shoe store.

Career abroad

Otto Neurath's career spanned various regions. Between 1931 and 1934 he made frequent trips to the Soviet Union, where he worked at the Moscow Institute for Visual Statistics. This would lead to consequences, and he would end up threatened with arrest in Vienna after the Austrian fascists seized power.

Subsequently, Otto Neurath traveled directly from Moscow to exile in The Hague, Holland. From this event a new association would emerge with various graphic artists who would end up working with ‘him on the ISOTYPE language model.

In Holland, he extended his ISOTYPE language, and it would come to be called the Viennese method of Pictorial Statistics; later, it was developed further and was called the International System of Education for Typographic Figures.

The ISOTYPE program was further expanded in Oxford, England, after Neurath had to leave the Netherlands with the taking of the country by Nazi forces in 1940. Subsequently, Otto Neurath moved to the University of Reading (Oxford, United Kingdom), until his death on December 22, 1945.

Thought

Neurath's thinking has been documented and labeled "physicalism", characterized by a tendency to bring language to more scientific fields such as physics. That is, language itself ends up being considered a physical act.

In addition, Otto Neurath always showed interest in the practical aspect, and was aware of and sensitive to the problems related to the application of theoretical principles in the social field.

Plays

Of his outstanding works and contributions, the following are of special relevance:

• Empirical sociology (1931)
• Unified Science and Psychology (1933)
• The development of the Vienna Circle and the future of logical empiricism (1935)
• International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (1938).

Bibliographic references:

• Cartwright, N., Cat J., Fleck L,, and Uebel T.E. (2008). Otto Neurath: philosophy between science and politics (original name: Philosophy between science and politics). Cambridge University press.
• Ruiza, M., Fernández, T., and Tamaro, E. (2004). Otto Neurath biography. In Biographies and Lives. The Biographical Encyclopedia Online. Barcelona, ​​Spain).
• Symons, J., Pombo, O., Torres, J.M. (2010). Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science (original name: Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science). Editorial Springer.