In a sense clubs and societies were to many late 19th century Europeans what television and computers have become for most denizens of our fast developing electronic age. There were scores of intellectual societies, but comparatively few of them were formal, few kept full records, and few have been anything like as influential in their day or later as the Philosophische Gesellschaft an der Universität Wien.¹ Indeed, for thirty-four years, that is, from 1888 to 1922, the centerpiece of reflective Vienna would remain the University of Vienna Philosophical Society, nor did it finally expire until 1938 and the Hitler Anschluss.