The first book of the founder of the Vienna Circle

Schlick, Moritz. Lebensweisheit. Versuch einer Glückseligkeitslehre.

€ 1.800,00

First edition of Schlick's scarce first book: an enthusiastic ethical tract on the Epicurean concept of 'eudaimonia', in which happiness and pleasure are presented as the highest attainable good. A "peculiar" work including references to both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, surprising given Schlick's primary association with logical positivism, it "offers a clear example of the unresolved tension between Schlick's more sober technical work and his poetic leanings". Schlick reworks the broadly Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean notion of the "will to power" into "his own evolutionary conception of a 'will to pleasure' as the drive which governs all spheres of human activity pertaining to the attainment of practical ends" (Vrahimis, The Vienna Circle’s Reception of Nietzsche, p. 12). The question of ethics would occupy Schlick throughout his career, returning to the eudaimonist theme in his "Fragen der Ethik" (1930).