  Schlick was born in Berlin in 1882 and grew up as the son of a middle-class factory manager. After gymnasium, he attended the University of Berlin, intent from the start to study physics. His ambition led him to work with Max Planck and he received his Ph.D. in 1904. After a year of experimental work at Göttingen, he eventually made his way to Zurich where he took up the study of Philosophy. In 1910, he secured a position at Rostock, moving on to Kiel before assuming the Chair of Naturphilosophie at Vienna in 1922. Through all these changes, as well as subsequent modifications of his thought, the evidence of Schlick’s training in Berlin remained just below the surface. Schlick was, after all, the heir apparent to the tradition of philosophical physicists, a tradition founded by Hermann von Helmholtz, the icon of 19th Century physics and an influential leader of the zurück zu Kant movement, and continued by his student and (later) colleague Planck (Coffa 1991, 179–183).  Although few professional philosophers embraced the methods and problems of the philosophical physicists, they were highly influential throughout the community of professional physicists, largely due to their prestige.