A school of philosophy originating in fin-de-siècle Vienna with the work of the so-called Vienna Circle founded by Moritz Schlick and Hans Hahn. Its principal theoreticians were A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap, Ernst Mach, and Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Its aim was to create a new kind of philosophy informed by the principles of science and logic. By doing so it hoped to demonstrate the irrelevance (and indeed the wrong-headedness) of metaphysics, and the synthetic thinking of post-Kantian thought. It applied a verification principle to all statements about the world and rejected all those that could not be verified as true. For example, the statement ‘the universe is infinite’ cannot be verified because neither universe as such nor the idea of infinity can be verified. Logical positivism has had very little influence on critical theory. See also analytic philosophy; empiricism.