Lebensweisheit. Versuch einer Glückseligkeitslehre.

First edition. 8vo. vi, 341, [1], 4 [publisher’s advertisements] pp. Original drab cloth over flexible boards, spine and front cover lettered in red, top edge in red (neat contemporary ownership inscription to front pastedown, small portion of loss to upper corner of front free endpaper, otherwise internally clean; some trivial shelf wear to extremities, still an excellent copy). München, C. H. Beck.

The scarce first book by Mortiz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle; an enthusiastic ethical tract on the Epicurean concept of eudaimonia in which happiness and pleasure are presented as the highest attainable good. 

A 'peculiar' work including references to both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, surprising given Schlick's primary association with logical positivism, it 'offers a clear example of the unresolved tension between Schlick's more sober technical work and his poetic leanings'. Schlick reworks the broadly Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean notion of the 'will to power' into 'his own evolutionary conception of a 'will to pleasure' as the drive which governs all spheres of human activity pertaining to the attainment of practical ends' (Vrahimis, 'The Vienna Circle’s Reception of Nietzsche', p. 12).

The question of ethics would occupy Schlick throughout his career, returning to the eudaimonist theme in his Fragen der Ethik (1930).

Stock Code: 234291