Otto Neurath, one of the founders of Vienna Circle, was also involved in an intense lifelong activity as educator. Better still: his educational activity and reflection was the flipside of his epistemological reflection. His position in the Protokollsätze debate has a clear educational bending and the enterprise of the Encyclopedia of the Unified Science is impossible to understand outside Neurath’s ‘education-driven’ epistemology. The paper intends to pinpoint the educational elements underlying Neurath’s epistemological stance (from his early conference on Descartes up to the Encyclopedia of the Unified Science through the debate with Carnap and Schlick on Physikalismus), showing how his empiricism is far from any myth of the given and fosters, on the contrary, an empirical-critical attitude which recognize the social embeddedness of the science and therefore the necessity of a strong alliance between democracy and science under the aegis of the education (with a significant convergence on Dewey’s thought) in order to avoid any fall into the Pseudorationalismus (the fatal conceit of being in possession of a Methodology permitting to answer questions in a conclusive way) on the theoretical side and – on the social side – into the divorce between science (as critical attitude) and society. Neurath’s empiricism, as opposite to Pseudorationalismus, appeals to education as constitutive dimension of scientific practice and, by rejecting any fetishism both of methodology and of allegedly conclusive evidence, offers hints to overcome both Pseudorationalismus and narrow-minded empiricism in the educational research. Furthermore, education as humanization (that is, in Neurath’s words, the attempt “to build up a more comprehensive knowledge by simply looking at the environment”) promotes the democratization of knowledge which is necessary because “[s]ince everybody [in modern societies] is implicated in taking, directly or indirectly, common decisions, the spreading of knowledge seems to be essential for the smooth working of democracy”. For these reasons Neurath’s visual education (Bildpädagogik), as means to disseminate scientific knowledge and to foster meditative attitude and argumentative habits (Neurath’s phrases), is not a sort of parergon to Neurath’s ‘epistemological’ approach but it is tightly interwoven with it. Finally, it will be shown how the project of the Encyclopedia of the Unified Science is a powerful anticipation of the distributed knowledge in the era of Internet. Better still: it is the attempt to reach ‘Internet-like’ cognitive objectives through a still ‘typographic’ medium. For all these reasons Neurath’s educational reflection has an enduring value for the educational research.

It is a historical-philosophical research which provides an analysis of the texts and the theoretical approach of a leading figure of XX century educational practice and theory. For these reasons the sources are essentially all books and articles written by Neurath and the literature about his work.

Three outcomes are expected: first, to highlight how the educational reflection is a constitutive dimension of Neurath's theory of science (and this is paradigmatic of how essential the 'educational moment' is to any post-empiricist epistemology); second, to explore the connection education-science-democracy in Neurath's theoretical device, whose suggestions are more relevant than ever in our techno-scientific era; third, to show how Neurath's project of Encyclopedia of Unified Science plus Visual Education is an anticipation of Internet.