Otto Neurath

Otto Neurath was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist and political economist, and a leading figure of the Vienna Circle, for which he served as principal author of its 1929 manifesto. Neurath championed the Unity of Science movement, directing the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science project, which aimed to show that the methods and findings of all the sciences could be integrated within a single physicalist framework rather than treated as separate incompatible domains. He is remembered for the image known as Neurath's boat, comparing the revision of scientific knowledge to sailors who must rebuild their ship plank by plank while it is still at sea, since there is no dry dock from which to reconstruct knowledge entirely from scratch, an image that became a standard illustration of holistic approaches to scientific knowledge. Neurath also invented ISOTYPE, a system of standardized pictorial symbols for representing statistical and social information visually. He fled Austria in 1934 and continued his work on unified science and visual statistics in exile until his death in 1945.