The Legacy of the Vienna Circle a Century On

Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Slovenia
December 4, 2025
(possibly continuing on December 5)

This symposium marks a century since the intellectual height of the Vienna Circle, whose members helped redefine the relationship between science and philosophy. Their approach to empiricism, logic, language, and the critique of metaphysics shaped the development of analytic philosophy and set lasting standards for clarity, rigour, and scientific conception of the world.

We invite contributions that reflect on how the Vienna Circle's ideas remain relevant (or problematic) within contemporary philosophical debates. We particularly encourage submissions that show how themes developed by the Vienna Circle can inform current discussions in philosophy of science and epistemology.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Reassessing logical empiricism in light of current debates on realism, scientific pluralism, or theory-ladenness.
• The continued role of formal methods in philosophy of science.
• The critique of metaphysics and its legacy in analytic philosophy.
• Epistemological questions about justification, coherence, and the structure of scientific knowledge.
• The Vienna Circle’s vision of unified science and its relevance to interdisciplinarity today
• The political and social dimensions of scientific inquiry, including the relation between science and democracy

The symposium will feature six talks of sixty minutes each (including discussion). If there is a high level of interest, the event may be extended into a second day, December 5.

Call for Abstracts
If you are interested in presenting your paper (forty-five minute presentation followed by fifteen minutes of discussion), please send an abstract of approximately 500 words to [email protected] by October 10, 2025.

Organizers
Borut Trpin, Bojan Borstner, and Martin Justin
Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor
Slovenian Society for Analytic Philosophy and Philosophy of Science

Acknowledgement:

This symposium is supported by the research project Scientific Discovery and Scientific Justification: A Coherentist Perspective (project number J6-60107), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency.