An interesting peripheral figure of the Vienna Circle, Josef Schächter was ordained as a rabbi in 1926 and taught Talmud at the Hebräische Pädagogium in Vienna. He studied philosophy under Mortiz Schlick at the University of Vienna, completing a dissertation on Nicolai Hartmann’s critical realist metaphysics under Schlick’s supervision in 1931, and regularly participated in the Vienna Circle’s weekly discussion meetings at the Institute of Mathematics on Boltzmanngasse 5.
Schächter’s main work, Prolegomena to a Critical Grammar was edited by Schlick, who also contributed a short introduction. It was published in Schriften zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung, an important monograph series that included the first appearance Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).
The work ‘stands in splendid isolation as the best specimen of the logical positivist analysis of natural language’ (Paul Foulkes, Foreword to the English Edition, 1971). It’s object is to develop a universal grammar and the prefatory remarks of both Schächter and Schlick acknowledge the influence of Wittgenstein, although the aim and approach differ from Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Grammatik. The Prolegomena not only explains the general, philosophical principles to be followed, but in the light of these proceeds to cover the entire range of conventional grammar.
Schächter’s involvement with the Vienna Circle began to wane after Schlick’s murder by his former student Johann Nelböck in 1936. He emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1938 and continued to write ‘mainly in Hebrew about the connections between philosophy, religion, and world views, employing a logical analysis in the spirit of Schlick, Waismann, and Wittgenstein’ (Stadler, The Vienna Circle, p. 484).