Werner Leinfellner (27 January 1921 – 6 April 2010) was professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and at the Vienna University of Technology. After recovering from life-threatening wounds during World War II, he studied chemistry and physics at the Universities of Vienna and Graz, eventually turning to the study of the philosophy of science, and receiving his Ph.D. in 1959. He moved to the United States in 1967, in part, because of problems faced by empirically oriented philosophers in obtaining academic positions in Austria and Germany. He is notable for his contributions to philosophy of science, as a member of European Academy of Sciences and Arts, for founding the journal Theory and Decision, for co-founding Theory and Decision Library, and for co-founding the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society and International Wittgenstein Symposium.
Biography
Intellectual Werner Leinfellner was a pioneer of scientific philosophy, game and decision theory in the tradition of the Vienna Circle. From 1945 to 1950, he studied chemistry and physics at the University of Graz and the University of Vienna and during this time he did research in chemistry. In 1954, he turned to the study of philosophy, logic and the philosophy of science and received his Ph.D. in 1959 for his dissertation Anschauung, Abstraktion und Integration im modernen physikalischen Denken (Intuition, abstraction and integration in modern physical thought) from the University of Vienna. From 1960 to 1963, he worked as a research assistant at LMU Munich in philosophy of science and logic. In 1963, he moved back to Vienna and was a research fellow and assistant professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in philosophy of science, economics, social and political sciences, and game and decision theory. During this time, he was also a lecturer at the University of Vienna. In 1967, due to an unfavorable political and scientific climate in post-war Austria, he was unable to obtain a tenured faculty position in Austria and so he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, and joined the department of philosophy at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln as a full professor. In 1970, he founded the journal Theory and Decision, an international journal for philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. The founding of the journal was, in part, a reaction to the dogmatic, subjective, and metaphysical approaches he had encountered in Europe prior to coming to the United States. His vision was that Theory and Decision would help found a philosophy of the social science based on three premises:
(1) it would help in the formation of categories based on logic and mathematics for the social sciences; (2) it would promote the development of mathematical theories and research methods for the social sciences; and (3) it would promote the integration of theories and formal methods across the social sciences. In 1974, he cofounded Theory and Decision Library also based on these three principles. Indeed, Eberlein and Berghel (1988) concluded:
It was essentially Werner Leinfellner's accomplishment that the ideal of logical empiricism in the 1930s and 1940s, to create a "unified science", was replaced by that of a "methodological unity of science". Accordingly,... the THEORY AND DECISION school of the philosophy of the social science can substantiate his claim: "... There are no longer any methodological differences at issue". Certainly the term "methodological" has to be interpreted in a broad sense, implicating the unity of science due to common standards of theory formation and to the fact that theories are the methodological basic units of the social science disciplines. Furthermore, "methodological unity", in the context of this journal and library, refers to the continuously differentiated and integrated unity of an undogmatic, pluralistic philosophy of the social sciences (page xii). In 1976, Werner Leinfellner together with his wife Elisabeth Leinfellner cofounded the Austrian Wittgenstein Society and the International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel. In 1986, he became professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and returned to Vienna Austria as professor at the Vienna University of Technology. In 1991, he became a member of the Science Board at the Institute Vienna Circle. Its goal is to document the continued development of the Vienna Circle's work in science and the continued application of logical-empirical thought to the philosophy of science and thereby it continues Leinfellner's goal of breaking away from irrational, dogmatic, fundamentalist though. During his career, he received several awards and prizes including Theodor Körner Prize (twice), the Medal of the College de France, Paris, the Grand Honorary Cross for Science and Art, 1st Class, Austria, and membership in the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Personal During World War II, he was required to serve in the German army and was subsequently seriously wounded on the Russian front. After a year of recovering from his wounds he deserted the German army and joined the resistance at the end of the war In 1960, he married Elisabeth Leinfellner and they had one daughter Ruth. He died in a Vienna hospital on 6 April 2010, his wife Elisabeth having preceded him in death three months earlier, on 4 January 2010.
Philosophical and scientific views
Philosophy of science For Leinfellner, science and philosophy are complementary in that they are both required for knowledge and discovery. Science has revealed a whole new way of viewing nature and society than existed prior to the 20th century. In the past, according to Leinfellner, physical and chemical processes were thought to follow deterministic laws of nature, but this view fell through as the sciences became theoretically more rigorous. In the social and economic sciences, he argued that we have to drop the notion of deterministic laws and search for rules instead. These rules, to varying degrees, involve randomness. Indeed, there are likely an enormous number of social rules all subject to randomness that would appear to result in chaos, but more likely these—rules discovered by the social and economic sciences—produce systems that are more or less stable but subject to chaotic breakdowns now and then. For Leinfellner, this probabilistic aspect of rules and laws extends to the universe.
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