 Herbert Feigl was born on December 14, 1902, in the then Austrian town of Reichenberg (nowadays Liberec, Czech Republic). Feigl’s parents were Jewish, but not religious. His father, a trained weaver, was said to be an ardent atheist; he was a skillful and highly ingenious textile designer and became later in his career one of the most influential leaders in the Austrian textile industry. Feigl’s mother, who had a lifelong interest in the arts, filled him with enthusiasm for classical music, particularly for the symphonies of Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler. In 1921, Feigl began to study mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Munich. Because of the anti-Semitic climate in Germany (and in particular in Munich) he moved, in 1922, to the University of Vienna where he studied under Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, Hans Thirring, and Karl Bühler. In the very same year, he wrote an essay on the philosophical significance of Einstein’s theory of relativity for which he obtained a prize in a competition (with Schlick, Ernst von Aster and Max von Laue as referees). In 1924, Feigl became one of the co-founders of the Vienna Circle. In 1927, he finished his doctoral dissertation in philosophy on the relationship between chance and law in the natural sciences. Inspired by discussions with Karl Popper and Hans Reichenbach, Feigl, in 1929, published the monograph Theorie und Erfahrung in der Physik. In the same year, he gave a series of lectures at the Bauhaus in Dessau, between which and the Vienna Circle there were interesting parallels in both intellectual outlook and political approach (see Galison 1990). In 1930 Feigl married Maria Kasper, a fellow student at the University of Vienna, and had a son (Eric Feigl).