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By 1936, logical positivism — the doctrine that only empirically verifiable or logically necessary statements are meaningful — had conquered half of academic philosophy. The Vienna Circle, led by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, had declared metaphysics literally nonsense and promised to rebuild philosophy on the unshakeable foundation of science and formal logic. Then it began to die. Schlick was shot dead on a university staircase in June 1936 by a former student. The Nazis scattered the circle. By the time Quine published 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' in 1951, the movement had suffered arguably the most surgical demolition in twentieth-century philosophy: Quine showed that the analytic-synthetic distinction — the very spine of positivism — could not be coherently drawn. Carl Hempel's '...
Popular framing: Logical positivism was a fashionable philosophy that eventually went out of style.
Structural analysis: The 1950s-60s revival was a dead-cat bounce: accumulated institutional investment — careers, journals, graduate programs — generated genuine technical activity that looked like progress, sustained by sunk-cost reasoning at the discipline level. Path dependence meant the program kept producing ever-more-sophisticated machinery against ever-smaller problems, because admitting the foundation was unsound meant voiding decades of professional capital. The new papers weren't signs of life; they were the last energy of a tradition consuming itself, mistaking 'sophisticated' for 'sustainable.'
The popular framing treats philosophical refutation as an event rather than a process, missing that the movement's most technically impressive phase came after its foundations were destroyed. Understanding why brilliant people double down after decisive defeat — and why that doubling-down can produce genuine subsidiary knowledge even as it fails at the core goal — requires the sunk cost and dead cat bounce models, not the logic of refutation alone.
