(der Wiener Kreis) A group of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who met in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s whose work became known as logical positivism. The meetings were initiated and chaired by Moritz Schlick, a physicist from Berlin appointed to a chair in theoretical physics at Vienna University in 1922. Membership of the circle included such luminaries as Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Otto Neurath, and Hans Hahn. The group was disbanded when Schlick was murdered by an anti-Jewish former student on the steps of his university building in 1936. Schlick was not in fact Jewish, but many of the other members of the circle were and they fled the country (mostly to America) before the Anschluss with Nazi Germany was announced in March 1938. The group produced a manifesto stipulating the core beliefs of their scientific world-conception: first, that knowledge only comes from experience (effectively a flat rejection of metaphysics); second, that the world can only be properly known by the application of logical analysis, which separates those statements which can be reduced to simpler statements referring to an empirical reality, and those which cannot and therefore contain logical errors or confusions. The ultimate goal of the Vienna Circle was a unified science, but it was never finally realized.